In 1905, representatives from dozens of radical labor groups came together in Chicago to form One Big Union—the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known as the Wobblies. The union was a big presence in the labor movement, leading strikes, walkouts, and rallies across the nation. And everywhere its members went, they sang.Their songs were sung in mining camps and textile mills, hobo jungles and flop houses, and anywhere workers might be recruited to the Wobblies’ cause. The song...

A monumental work, expansive in scope, covering the life, times, and culture of that most famous of the Wobblies—songwriter, poet, hobo, thinker, humorist, martyr—Joe Hill. It is a journey into the Wobbly culture that made Hill and the capitalist culture that killed him. Many aspects of the life and lore of Joe Hill receive their first and only discussion in IWW historian Franklin Rosemont’s opus.In great detail, the issues that Joe Hill raised and grappled with in his life: capita...

Winner of the Working-Class Studies Association C.L.R. James AwardSeen as a pioneering figure in the critical study of whiteness, US historian David Roediger has sometimes received criticism, and praise, alleging that he left Marxism behind in order to work on questions of identity. This volume collects his recent and new work implicitly and explicitly challenging such a view. In his historical studies of the intersections of race, settler colonialism, and slavery,...

A prize-winning historian details his intellectual and political evolutionWritten by the author of the landmark book The Wages of Whiteness and one of the key figures in the critical study of race and racism in America, An Ordinary White is the life story of the historian and radical American writer, David Roediger.With wry wit and keen observation, Roediger chronicles his intellectual and political evolution from growing up in his souther...

The Sinking Middle Class challenges the “save the middle class” rhetoric that dominates our political imagination. The slogan misleads us regarding class, nation, and race. Talk of middle class salvation reinforces myths holding that the US is a providentially middle class nation. Implicitly white, the middle class becomes viewed as unheard amidst supposed concerns for racial justice and for the poor. Roediger shows how little the US has been a middle class nation. The term seldom...

Against Labor highlights the tenacious efforts by employers to organize themselves as a class to contest labor. Ranging across a spectrum of understudied issues, essayists explore employer anti-labor strategies and offer incisive portraits of people and organizations that aggressively opposed unions. Other contributors examine the anti-labor movement against a backdrop of larger forces, such as the intersection of race and ethnicity with anti-labor activity, and anti-unionism in t...

How did immigrants to the United States come to see themselves as white?David R. Roediger has been in the vanguard of the study of race and labor in American history for decades. He first came to prominence as the author of The Wages of Whiteness, a classic study of racism in the development of a white working class in nineteenth-century America. In Working Toward Whiteness, Roediger continues that history into the twentieth century. He recounts ho...

FROM THE WORLDS OF BUSINESS, POLITICS, HISTORY, LITERATURE, ENTERTAINMENT, AND MORE . . ."Think how much happier women would be if, instead of endlessly fretting about what the males in their lives are thinking, they could relax, secure in the knowledge that the correct answer is: very little."--DAVE BARRY"I'd tell you what I really thought about the national media, but as my good friend Dana Carvey would say, 'Wouldn't be prudent. Not gonna do it.' "--GEORGE ...

A vibrant, fast-paced exploration of the pivotal and dynamic 1920s era, focusing on many of the colorful characters of the time and on three presidents: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.The images of the 1920s have been indelibly imprinted on the American imagination: jazz, bootleggers, flappers, talkies, the Model T Ford, Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh's history-making flight over the Atlantic. But it was also the era of the hard-won vote for women, racial injustice, c...

Few books have caused as big a stir as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, when it was published in April 1939. By May, it was the nation's number one bestseller, but in Kern County, California -- the Joads' newfound home -- the book was burned publicly and banned from library shelves. Obscene in the Extreme tells the remarkable story behind this fit of censorship.When W. B. "Bill" Camp, a giant cotton and potato grower, presided over its burning in downtown Bak...

From "the finest literary stylist of the American right" (Allan Carlson, author of The American Way)****, a surprising and spirited account of how true conservatives have always been antiwar and anti-empire.Conservatives love war, empire, and the military-industrial complex. They abhor peace, the sole and rightful property of liberals. Right? Wrong.As Bill Kauffman makes clear, true conservatives have always resisted the imperial a...

New York Times Bestseller: A "remarkable and evenhanded study of Ronald Reagan" from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg ( The New York Times).Updated with a new preface by the author, this captivating biography of America's fortieth president recounts Ronald Reagan's life—from his poverty-stricken Illinois childhood to his acting career to his California governorship to his role as commander in chi...