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 ...

Clarence Darrow is best remembered for his individual cases, whether defending the thrill killers Leopold and Loeb or John Scopes's right to teach evolution in the classroom. In the first full-length biography of Darrow in decades, the historian Andrew E. Kersten narrates the complete life of America's most legendary lawyer and the struggle that defined it, the fight for the American traditions of individualism, freedom, and liberty in the face of the country's inexorable march toward mode...

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...

Atone time, Asa Philip Randolph (1889-1979) was a household name. As president ofthe all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), he was an embodimentof America’s multifaceted radical tradition, a leading spokesman for BlackAmerica, and a potent symbol of trade unionism and civil rights agitation fornearly half a century. But with the dissolution of the BSCP in the 1970s, theassaults waged against organized labor in the 1980s, and the over...

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"...

From the nineteenth-century textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, to the triumph of unions in the twentieth century and their waning influence today, the contest between labor and capital for the American bounty has shaped our national experience.In this stirring new history, Philip Dray shows us the vital accomplishments of organized labor and illuminates its central role in our social, political, economic, and cultural evolution. His epic, character-driven narrative not only re...

“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.

“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...

**“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...

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...

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...