This past January, the newly elected governor Scott Walker declared war on Wisconsin's progressive roots. Under the guise of budget repair, he and his Republican colleagues in the state legislature introduced a whole host of initiatives meant to roll back hard-won gains for workers and recast the role of government in the state to fit his own conservative ideology.In The Battle for Wisconsin, the labor historian Andrew E. Kersten shows just how far-reaching these "reforms"...

Before the emergence of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., there were several key leaders who fought for civil rights in the United States. Among them was A. Philip Randolph, who perhaps best embodied the hopes, ideals, and aspirations of black Americans. Born in the South at the start of the Jim Crow era, Randolph was by his thirtieth birthday a prime mover in the movement to expand civil, social, and economic rights in America. A Socialist and a radical, Randolph devoted his life to energ...

One of the oldest, strongest, and largest labor organizations in the U.S., the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had 4 million members in over 20,000 union locals during World War II. The AFL played a key role in wartime production and was a major actor in the contentious relationship between the state, organized labor, and the working class in the 1940s. The war years are pivotal in the history of American labor, but books on the AFL’s experiences are scant, with far more on the radical ...

Abolitionist thought visualizes a world without prisons – or a radical reduction or transformation of prisons and punishment. This fascinating book explores the abolitionist ideas of key early socialists and anarchists, writing from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. It considers how these radical thinkers can provide insights into our present condition, both by highlighting the harms of punishment and by pointing to inspiring alternatives to current policy and practice.By ...

This salient resource offers clinicians a comprehensive multi-tiered framework for identifying, addressing, and reducing food insecurity among children and their families. Reinforcing the importance of food insecurity as a key social determinant of health, this monograph reviews the epidemiology and presents in-depth guidelines for screening for food insecurity and hunger. Recommendations for screening in a busy clinical setting as well as the strengths and limitations of widely-used instr...

“A compelling and readable story of resistance to the new economic order.” —Boston GlobeIn the wake of the profound economic crisis known as the Great Depression, a group of high-powered individuals joined forces to campaign against the New Deal—not just its practical policies but the foundations of its economic philosophy. The titans of the National Association of Manufacturers and the chemicals giant DuPont, together with little-known men like W. C. Mull...

“The American taxpayer”—angered by government waste and satisfied only with spending cuts—has preoccupied elected officials and political commentators since the Reagan Revolution. But resistance to progressive taxation has older, deeper roots. American Tax Resisters presents the full history of the American anti-tax movement that has defended the pursuit of limited taxes on wealth and battled efforts to secure social justice through income redistribution for the past 150 years.

Have the poor fared best by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America:-- The mobilization of the unemployed during the Great Depression that gave rise to the Workers' Alliance of America-- The industrial str...

**“A gripping and forceful narrative.”—Nancy F. Cott, author of Public VowsAn “enthralling” (Michael Kazin, Washington Post) account of America’s shift from a rural and agrarian society to an urban and industrial society.**In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technological innovation made possible dramatic increases in industrial and agricultural productivity; by 1919, per capita gross national product had soared. But this new wealth and n...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Democracy Awakening**, the paradoxical evolution of the Republican Party—founded to give the poor equal opportunity, but too often aligned with the country's elites.****"The most comprehensive account of the GOP and its competing impulses.” —**Los Angeles TimesWhen Abraham Lincoln helped create the Republican Party on ...

“The apparent partisan stability of contemporary southern politics belies a complex and dynamic process that makes it doubtful one party can persist as the dominant force in the most diverse region of the United States . . . This truly ain’t your daddy’s Dixie.”This article appears in the Fall 2012 issue of Southern Cultures. The full issue is also available as an ebook.Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the Universi...

Illinois State Historical Society Certificate of Excellence 2016During the Great Migration of the 1920s and 1930s, southern African Americans flocked to the South Side Chicago community of Bronzeville, the cultural, political, social, and economic hub of African American life in the city, if not the Midwest. The area soon became the epicenter of community activism as working-class African Americans struggled for equality in housing and employment. In this study, Lionel Kimble Jr. d...