The Industrial Workers of the World is a union unlike any other. Founded in 1905 in Chicago, it rapidly gained members across the world thanks to its revolutionary, internationalist outlook. By using powerful organising methods including direct-action and direct-democracy, it put power in the hands of workers. This philosophy is labeled as ‘revolutionary industrial unionism’ and the members called, affectionately, ‘Wobblies’.This book is the first to look at the history of the IWW ...

“Fear Itself deeply reconceptualizes the New Deal and raises countless provocative questions.”—David Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Freedom from FearRedefining our traditional understanding of the New Deal, Fear Itself finally examines this pivotal American era through a sweeping international lens that juxtaposes a struggling democracy with enticing ideologies like Fascism and Communism. Ira Katznelson, “a towering figure in the study of Ameri...

Populism is a central concept in the current media debates about politics and elections. However, like most political buzzwords, the term often floats from one meaning to another, and both social scientists and journalists use it to denote diverse phenomena. What is populism really? Who are the populist leaders? And what is the relationship between populism and democracy? This book answers these questions in a simple and persuasive way, offering a swift guide to populism in theory and prac...

**The classic work on how different ethnic groups have economically, socially, and educationally adapted to American society“At once useful as a concise history of major ethnic groups and significant as a quiet but powerful attack on liberal beliefs about minorities, racism, segregation, and affirmative action.” —New York Times**A distinguished economist traces the history of nine American ethnic groups—the Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Blacks,...

Wobblies and Zapatistas offers the reader an encounter between two generations and two traditions. Andrej Grubačić is an anarchist from the Balkans. Staughton Lynd is a lifelong pacifist, influenced by Marxism. They meet in dialogue in an effort to bring together the anarchist and Marxist traditions, to discuss the writing of history by those who make it, and to remind us of the idea that “my country is the world.” Encompassing a Left-libertarian perspective and an emphatically ac...

This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy—a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s—its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatmen...

The fascinating story of Franklin Roosevelt, the Greatest Generation, and the freedoms they won, is a “stirring, heady dose of American history by a…progressive thinker” (Kirkus Reviews).On January 6, 1941, the Greatest Generation gave voice to its founding principles, the Four Freedoms: Freedom from want and from fear. Freedom of speech and religion. In the name of the Four Freedoms they fought the Great Depression. In the name of the Four Freedoms they d...

From the dawning of the industrial epoch, wage earners have organized themselves into unions,fought bitter strikes, and gone so far as to challenge the very premises of the system by creatinginstitutions of democratic self-management aimed at controlling production without bosses. Withspecific examples drawn from every corner of the globe and every period of modern history, thispathbreaking volume comprehensively traces this often underappreciated historical tra...

In a book of deep and telling ironies, Peter Schrag provides essential background for understanding the fractious debate over immigration. Covering the earliest days of the Republic to current events, Schrag sets the modern immigration controversy within the context of three centuries of debate over the same questions about who exactly is fit for citizenship. He finds that nativism has long colored our national history, and that the fear—and loathing—of newcomers has provided one of the fa...

A new history exploring U.S. immigration in global contextHistories investigating U.S. immigration have often portrayed America as a domestic melting pot, merging together those who arrive on its shores. Yet this is not a truly accurate depiction of the nation's complex connections to immigration. Offering a brand-new global history of the subject, Foreign Relations takes a comprehensive look at the links between American immigration and U.S. foreign relat...

In a work of sweeping scope and luminous detail, Elizabeth Borgwardt describes how a cadre of World War II American planners inaugurated the ideas and institutions that underlie our modern international human rights regime. Borgwardt finds the key in the 1941 Atlantic Charter and its Anglo-American vision of "war and peace aims." In attempting to globalize what U.S. planners heralded as domestic New Deal ideas about security, the ideology of the Atlantic Charter--buttressed by FDR’s "Four ...

“Fascinating. . . . Williams tells the story of La Guardia and Roosevelt with insight and elegance.”—Edward Glaeser, New York Times Book Review