Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas最新文献

{"title":"Histories of Racial Capitalism","authors":"Mary Poole","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581489","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581489","url":null,"abstract":"As one of many examples of academic theory borrowed from social movements, “racial capitalism” was first articulated by anti-apartheid activists in South Africa. Racial capitalism is thus the product of a global system of colonization, and “race” itself a multiplicity of expressions. Histories of racial capitalism produced in the United States, however, have tended to remain contained within the United States and a Black/white definition of race. That story begins with slavery and moves through emancipation, segregation, redlining, and the creation of racial geographies and structural mechanisms of the production of property in whiteness. This is all essential work. Nonetheless, without the global context, US histories of racial capitalism can suffer from misalignment with Indigenous dispossession and settler colonization, erasing Indigenous people from land and from history.Histories of Racial Capitalism breaks from that beaten path. This outstanding book makes a modest claim to demonstrate through history that race is constitutive of capitalism. In fact, it does much more than that. It models a number of specific approaches, a new “methodological practice,” that repositions US racial capitalism in the broader history of global colonization (10).Racial capitalism is defined here not as a subfield of the study of capitalism but as the “process by which the key dynamics of capitalism—accumulation/dispossession, contract/coercion, and others—become articulated through race” (10). The process has two entwined parts: violent dispossession leads to the creation of new racial distinctions, which in turn naturalizes racial inequalities. This understanding of racial capitalism as a dynamic process contrasts with the earlier Black radical tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, Barbara Fields, C. L. R. James, and Cedric Robinson. This book draws heavily on that foundation but charts a new course that disengages from the “race first” or “class first” debate (10). While this new iteration critiques capitalism in a Marxist tradition, it rejects Marx's progressive theory of history. Borrowing from Patrick Wolfe, racial capitalism is presented here not as an event but as a “structuring logic,” one in which primitive accumulation is not a stage of capitalist development but “an ongoing organizing principle of capitalist social order” (11).Debt is a theme that demonstrates this continuity. K-Sue Park describes debt as a weapon in the hands of British settlers, who gained title to Indigenous peoples’ lands through loan defaults. Race was thus imagined into being as a means to facilitate unequal power between Indigenous people that held legal rights to land and European settlers. Thus, it was in the era of formal colonization that the mechanism of debt was invented for displacement in America. Land itself was transformed from a living thing to a commodity. In his essay, Destin Jenkins demonstrates the role of debt in the realignment of the white North and South after the e","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387643","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tending the Fire","authors":"Elliott Young","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581321","url":null,"abstract":"In 1910, Antonio Rodriguez, a ranch hand in Rocksprings, Texas, was lynched and burned by a mob of white men. For historians of Texas, this is an all-too-familiar tale of Anglo violence against Mexicans, but in Bad Mexicans Kelly Lytle Hernández immediately transports us to Mexico, where people staged protests, tore down American flags, and shouted “Mueren los yanquis!” (Death to the Yankees!) in response to the brutal racist violence. Porfirio Díaz, the long-standing president of Mexico, sent security forces to squash the protests and muzzled the press, insisting that they cease to comment on the anti-American protests. This opening episode reveals Lytle Hernández's methodology. She will take us on a journey that weaves back and forth across the US-Mexico border to tell a story of a transnational anticapitalist movement at the birth of revolutionary Mexico.Historians, as Benedict Anderson intimated, are the clerics of the nation, telling the origin stories of a particular country with reverence and awe. We have been penitent and sober priests, but in our religious zeal we have forgotten that there is a world outside our temple. Kelly Lytle Hernández may be the antipreacher we have been waiting for to introduce us to this new world beyond nations and borders by bringing us back to the future with a compelling narrative about a plucky band of anarchist Mexicans living in the United States and declaring war on capital, authority, and the Church. In this transnational history, the nation remains in the frame, but other stories that cross and spill over borders come into focus. Putting Ricardo Flores Magón and the magonistas at the center rather than the Mexican Revolution or radical organizing in the US West requires us to take off our national blinders and put on our progressive lenses.Bad Mexicans, Kelly Lytle Hernández's latest in a series of groundbreaking books, forces us to confront Mexican and United States history in tandem, showing how labor struggles and political battles were not contained by the physical land border or even the boundaries of imagination of anarchists like Ricardo Flores Magón. The story of Flores Magón and the PLM has been told by historians in Mexico and elsewhere who see them as precursors of the Mexican Revolution and by Chicano historians who see them as exemplars of the fight against Anglo oppression. Lytle Hernández weaves the strands of these stories together, linking up their labor radicalism in Mexico to their work with socialists and anarchists in the United States and their strident condemnation of Anglo racism.It is fortuitous and a bit odd that Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) declared 2022 the year of Ricardo Flores Magón. A major avenue in Mexico City is named for Flores Magón, and so are several schools, libraries, and plazas. So at least in Mexico, Ricardo Flores Magón has not been forgotten, but he has been domesticated and co-opted. Flores Magón was rebranded by his former comrade a","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean","authors":"Evelyn P. Jennings","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581545","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581545","url":null,"abstract":"If any more evidence were needed to dethrone Christopher Columbus as a hero, the story told by Erin Woodruff Stone in Captives of Conquest should end the debate. Stone's main contribution to studies of the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the Americas is her geographic and temporal focus on the Caribbean and its littoral in the sixteenth century. As she notes in her introduction, much of the historiography to date, especially in English, has focused on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on areas that ultimately became part of the United States. By contrast, Stone argues that the enslavement of Indigenous peoples of the sixteenth-century Caribbean was both a crucial factor in the early collapse of Native populations in the region and a central element in Spanish strategies of conquest and colonization.Stone begins in the precontact Caribbean, highlighting the migrations and interconnections among peoples of the Antilles and the circum-Caribbean areas of Yucatán and the northern coast of South America. On the other side of the Atlantic, she argues that the Spanish physical and spiritual conquest of the Canary Islands established patterns of policy and practice that shaped later incursions in the Americas. For example, resistance by the Native Canarians led to warfare and enslavement. By the 1480s and 1490s a stream of Canarian slaves was added to a Mediterranean world of active slave trades from Africa, the Levant, and eastern Europe. The Spanish Crown sought to rationalize Canarian slavery as the result of “just war” against people who rejected the authority of the monarchy and the Christian god. These justifications for the enslavement of peoples claimed as Spanish subjects were transferred and further elaborated in the Caribbean beginning with Columbus.Popular narratives of Spanish American colonization often highlight the search for gold and converts to Catholicism as motives, but Stone is clear that Columbus proposed an active slave trade from the Caribbean to Spain as a source of labor and wealth from the beginning of his voyages. Though Queen Isabella opposed a transatlantic slave trade in Indigenous Americans, she did allow the enslavement of cannibals and those who resisted Spanish authority and conversion. Before long the Crown also claimed the royal fifth of slave sales and began to sell licenses for slaving expeditions. Hence, by the early years of the sixteenth century, the basic framework of Spanish policy and practice around Indigenous enslavement and slave trading had been established.The heart of Stone's story lies in the first half of the sixteenth century. In areas where Spaniards found resources of value, they needed laborers to extract them. In areas without such resources, or in places where they were quickly exhausted, the Indigenous people became the valued commodity. The gold mines of Española and Cuba and the pearl fisheries of coastal Tierra Firme were early sites in need of labor. Stone describes the develo","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contesting Chinese Contract Labor: Yung Wing's Reports and the Qing Mission to Peru","authors":"Heidi Tinsman","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581279","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In 1874, government officials in Qing China sent a Yale-educated special envoy named Yung Wing to Peru to survey the conditions of Chinese contract workers on plantations. A parallel mission to the better-known Qing survey of Chinese in Cuba, Yung Wing's trip to Peru has received almost no scholarly attention. Drawing on new archival evidence, this essay provides a historical analysis of the Qing mission to Peru and its official findings, as rendered in the original, 1874 English-language translation, “Yung Wing's Reports.” I argue that Yung Wing elaborated a multivocal, cross-cultural, and transimperial condemnation of Chinese indenture in Peru. Yung Wing served as a crucial broker across political and cultural systems. He strategically mobilized testimonies from American, Chilean, and Chinese informants and deployed abolitionist discourse to equate Chinese contract labor with African slavery. Denouncing Western failures to guarantee liberal principles for Chinese people, he pressured Qing authorities to protect Chinese subjects by opening formal legations in Latin America. Chinese workers in Peru had a different perspective, and their testimonies often diverged from Yung Wing's core argument. Chinese informants never equated contract labor with chattel slavery. Instead, they denounced employer failure to fulfill existing contract terms. Moreover, they provided evidence of successful collective efforts and alliances between Chinese and non-Chinese people that pressured Peruvian authorities to defend Chinese workers. Taken as a whole, “Yung Wing Reports” both elaborates a powerful Chinese denunciation of contract labor and demonstrates Chinese ability to negotiate its terms.","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387640","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Soldiers of Revolution: The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune","authors":"Nick Mansfield","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581503","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581503","url":null,"abstract":"Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight was Queen Victoria's favorite home and is now cared for by English Heritage. A “Swiss Cottage” in the grounds houses an eclectic museum put together by her children. One of the exhibits is a glass bottle allegedly carried during the Paris Commune of 1871 by a female incendiary (a petroleuse) who was summarily executed by government troops. The object testifies to horrific justification felt by polite Western society at the worst massacre in French history, which is at the heart of Mark Lause's latest book.Military history is too important to leave to traditional “drum and trumpet” military historians. Soldiers of Revolution joins a growing literature from labor historians interested in the role of working people in war. Examples include work of the late Victor Kiernan on transnational imperial armies, that of Peter Way and Jennine Hurl-Eamon on the eighteenth-century British army, and my own two-volume labor history on class, politics, and the nineteenth-century British army. More specialized publications include Roger Norman Buckley on the British army in the West Indies and slavery, Peter Stanley on the private army of the East India Company, and Joseph Cozens on the military and popular protest in Britain. An edited volume by Nir Arielli and Bruce Collins also covers some aspects of liberal and socialist transnational soldiers. Having previously published widely on this topic covering the period of the American Civil War, Mark Lause has accepted the challenge of using largely French sources to study a contemporaneous European conflict.It is a dense and closely argued account of an unnecessary dynastic war, the attempt by a revived French Republic to regroup after disaster, and, finally, the utter defeat of the working class led by utopian socialists in a bloodbath that took place on Paris streets familiar to tourists today. Though assuming a certain amount of knowledge from the reader, the heady chronological narrative, supported by a wide-ranging information, is completely gripping and includes a wealth of fascinating detail.The largely professional French Imperialist military endured a swift defeat at the hands of cleverly directed German conscripts backed by the industrialized might of Krupps and Co. Nevertheless, the newly proclaimed Republic improvised an army to continue the war, which reflected the rising class tensions in French society. The army was largely formed from the mobiles, the active sections of the part-time and territorial National Guard. In addition, units of self-governing francs-tireurs sprang up in patriotic fervor. Often lacking munitions or uniforms, they sometimes took the fight behind enemy lines and risked German firing squads if captured. Particular attention is also given to the militarized transnational idealists who rallied from all over Europe and beyond under the democratic socialist and republican banner of the charismatic revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. One Italian comr","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"London's Working-Class Youth and the Making of Post-Victorian Britain, 1958–1971","authors":"Mark Doyle","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581433","url":null,"abstract":"This is an ambitious, heavily researched, frustratingly undercooked book. Its purpose is to examine the extent to which the much-mythologized youth culture of sixties London was truly new. Did it signal the final death of Victorian Britain, or was it a slightly reconfigured version of older cultural formations? Setting up a dichotomy between historians who emphasize the period's continuities and those who, aligning with prevailing popular memory, emphasize change, Fuhg splits the difference, arguing that the 1960s were “a liminal period in which both the continuity of and dissociation from Victorian Britain were tangible . . . the old and new under the umbrella of the future” (7). It is a claim that is hard to refute. All ages, after all, are ages of transition. Nevertheless, unpicking the old from the new is a legitimate task for the historian, and this, in essence, is what Fuhg sets out to do.Fuhg's method is to peer beneath the breezy generalizations of contemporary commentators and the lofty claims of academic researchers by conducting a fine-grained analysis of everyday teenage life in London's urban spaces. Most historians would do this via one or several detailed case studies, but Fuhg's approach is more synthetic—or, perhaps more accurately, composite. Through prodigious research, principally in popular media, social science publications, and local government reports, he ranges freely across London's neighborhoods and entertainment districts, constructing a variegated picture of the thirteen-year period between 1958 and 1971 through the eyes of contemporaries and historians. The strongest parts of the book are those that explore how changes in the built environment facilitated cultural changes and the formation of youth subcultures. Coffee bars, suburbs, seaside resorts, council houses, youth clubs, and other locales allowed teenagers—newly affluent and mobile—to imagine a future that drew from, but wasn't limited by, Britain's past. While elements of Victorian culture such as class divisions, gender norms, imperial mindsets (especially racism), and outdoor associational life came under pressure in such venues, they didn't disappear. Thus, for example, Fuhg challenges the conventional wisdom that slum clearance, suburbanization, and the rise of television created a hopelessly fragmented and privatized working-class culture. Though he is not the first to say this (Mark Clapson, for one, has been making similar arguments since the 1990s), this careful attention to the lived experience of individuals and nicely evokes London's youth cultures in all their richness and gradations.Unfortunately, the book's insights are too often buried in a confusing mass of data that the author fails to guide us through. Each chapter is so filled with contemporary commentary and reminiscences—one chapter has over seven hundred endnotes—that reading them is a bit like trying to drink from a firehose. Often this data is contradictory, and sometimes it is factual","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland","authors":"Chad Pearson","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581447","url":null,"abstract":"Those in search of a fast-paced book that is both inspiring and tragic will profit from reading Toni Gilpin's The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland. This well-researched study explores decades of what Gilpin aptly calls “ceaseless class warfare” at International Harvester's production plants (282). She has produced the go-to book about labor unrest at the multilocational agricultural equipment giant, which ultimately led to the establishment of the CIO-affiliated Farm Equipment Workers Union (FE). These leftist union activists struggled mightily against state and business forces in numerous worksites over the course of decades, including in the years after securing collective bargaining rights. Unlike today's MAGAs, FE members likely did not perceive the nation as “great” during the post–World War II economic boom.Originating as a Yale dissertation produced under the direction of the late David Montgomery, The Long Deep Grudge offers rich descriptions of management's dictatorial practices at the giant International Harvester plants and the multiple struggles launched by wage earners on and off shop floors. Gilpin moves chronologically, first introducing us to the filthy rich McCormick family, a dynasty determined to rule unilaterally. Cyrus McCormick II, we learn, “focused obsessively” on managerial questions and remained convinced that he was a benevolent guardian. Yet he was unable to extinguish class conflict. The Chicago-based McCormick Works was the scene of intense unrest that led to the Haymarket affair after cops killed at least one protestor on May 3, 1886. This, and the following day's riot, left a meaningful legacy on both exploiters and workers.Labor-management relations remained tense in subsequent years, and workers continued to challenge their exploitative conditions by organizing walkouts and joining unions, including the Industrial Workers of the World. Like other industrial heads of the era, McCormick recognized the necessity of addressing his chronic labor problems holistically: “What can we do now in the way of improving our relations with our own workers?” (44). Management experimented with welfare programs, and Gilpin spotlights the role played by Arthur H. Young, who had previously worked to solve labor difficulties at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Young, who started at International Harvester in 1918, launched “a host of pioneering managerial practices,” including welfare programs and a company union, the “Industrial Council Plan” (45). Gilpin's statement that International Harvester was somewhat of a pioneer isn't entirely convincing given what industrial relations scholars like Bruce Kaufman have noted about the development of human resources, but her larger point is spot-on: management believed that repression alone could not solve their labor problems.The introduction of welfare work and company unions failed to hoodwink most proletarians into believi","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Magonismo</i>'s Legacy, Then and Now","authors":"Sonia Hernández","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581335","url":null,"abstract":"Bad Mexicans is a timely piece of scholarship. Notwithstanding recent criticism of scholars’ use of history as “confirm[ation] [of] [their] current political positions,” in my state, Texas, I find a book like Lytle Hernández's both vital and useful.1 It is precisely the contemporary value (or, for others, threat) of its historical content that makes Bad Mexicans a potentially transformative book. Lytle Hernández is not shy about employing this turn-of-the-twentieth-century story to insist once and for all that the histories of Mexico and the United States are intimately linked; this shared history has been consequential for both US and Mexican peoples. With an engaging prose accessible to public audiences, Lytle Hernández re-creates this shared history. Through the lens of magonismo and its greater legacy, I outline my main thoughts on Bad Mexicans as a series of historical lessons for us to consider.Lesson 1: Silencing political criticism erodes democracy—then and now. In January of last year, Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador declared 2022 the year of Ricardo Flores Magón to commemorate Magón's contributions to the Mexican Revolution. Ironically, he did so amid what has been a bloody war against Mexican journalists: 151 journalists have been killed since 1992, and thirteen in the first eight months of 2022. One cannot help but think of the crackdown on journalists and thinkers like Magón and colleagues over a century ago, precisely for critiquing then-president Porfirio Díaz and his associates, including US financiers who upheld Porfirian values.Porfirio Diaz's banning of Regeneración, the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM)’s main propaganda organ, and persecution forced Magón and colleagues to find alternative ways to spread critical knowledge and information among multiple audiences. By July 1907, as Lytle Hernández writes, Magón was not just hiding in Los Angeles; he was also making the city the new headquarters of the PLM. He worked with Modesto Díaz to reboot Regeneración under the new name Revolución. When Revolución hit the streets of Los Angeles in June 1907, authorities once again hunted Magón. Lytle Hernández outlines the way US authorities, including the newly created Federal Bureau of Investigation, collaborated with Mexican agents to silence and apprehend these “bad Mexicans” who stood as obstacles to state progress and capital buildup. Basing her narrative on binational archival material, Lytle Hernández shows the centrality of the United States in silencing political criticism to promote a state progress that quickly emerged as antidemocratic.Lesson 2: Anarchism and its various strands, including anarcho-syndicalism,2 were not obscure, narrow ideas and movements, as they have often been portrayed—even if the PLM and magonismo declined, anarchist ideas remained relevant throughout the revolution and the postrevolutionary period, and their spirit is noticeable in today's struggles in different parts of the world. Social rev","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On Account of Sex: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Making of Gender Equality Law","authors":"Elizabeth Tandy Shermer","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581559","url":null,"abstract":"Most Americans know Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a feminist icon whose likeness can still be found (more than two years after her passing) on T-shirts, mugs, and stickers. Images of the “Notorious RBG” usually show her in Supreme Court robes with the kind of stylish white collar the justice favored, and fans can now buy or get knitting patterns for the collar online. This cult following really grew in the new millennium, when Ginsburg developed a reputation for fiery opinions that thrilled progressives and liberals frustrated with conservatives on the Court and in Congress.But political scientist and legal expert Philippa Strum boldly argues that Ginsburg made her real impact on the law years before her 1993 nomination. On Account of Sex: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Making of Gender Equality Law focuses on Ginsburg's work in the 1970s for the American Civil Liberty Union's (ACLU) Women's Rights Project. This short, compelling book does a far better job than RBG, the 2018 documentary, to explain the work involved in bringing cases to the Court as well as Ginsburg's legal tactics, failures, and successes. She embraced opportunities to highlight to an all-male Court that sex discrimination affected women and men. She also later admitted taking inspiration from one of those justices, former NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall. He pursued cases that Ginsburg recognized as “building blocks” that had led to the monumental 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision (40). “We copied that,” Ginsburg admitted, because, she insisted, “real change, enduring change . . . happens one step at a time” (40, 53–54). But the Court resisted a clear forward march toward gender equality in the 1970s. Ginsburg pithily summarized it as a halting move “From No Rights to Half Rights to Confusing Rights” in a 1978 law review article published just two years before Jimmy Carter nominated her to the US Court of Appeals (142).Strum's account refreshingly stresses that RBG was never the only person, never the only woman lawyer, advancing the cause of women's rights or fighting sex discrimination. As such, On Account of Sex implicitly critiques the singular focus on RBG as a jurist as well as a lawyer. The book instead illustrates the value of telling the stories of the many people and movements fighting for lasting change. Strum, for example, highlights how legal icons Dorothy Kenyon and Pauli Murray pressured the ACLU to start the Women's Rights Project years before Ginsburg joined. Strum emphasizes that Ginsburg worked with others on or affiliated with that project and that she also relied on the work of her Columbia law students as well as attorneys connected to other important initiatives, like the still-potent Southern Poverty Law Center. Strum, like RBG, also recognizes the bravery of the ordinary people willing to go to court, including Susan Struck, an unwed air force captain who was given the choice to leave the service or terminate her pregnancy before the 1972 Roe decision, an","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contested and Dangerous Sea: North Atlantic Fishermen, Their Wives, Unions, and the Politics of Exclusion","authors":"James P. Kraft","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581405","url":null,"abstract":"In this concise, engaging study, Colin J. Davis explores the history of a neglected group of workers—transatlantic fishermen. The study compares the problems and political activities of New England and British fishermen after World War II, when foreign competition and technological innovations threatened the men's livelihoods as well as the health of Atlantic Ocean fisheries. Fishermen's trade unions and wives helped to confront these threats, with uneven levels of success. This working-class drama unfolds gradually, and it speaks to major themes in social and labor history.The drama begins with an overview of the North Atlantic fishing business. The book's opening chapter discusses the types of fish that men harvested and areas of the seas where the fish were found. It also describes daily routines and job hierarchies on modern fishing vessels, whose large trawls collected fish by the ton. At that point, the book brings the hazards of deep-sea fishing into sharp relief. Working on a constantly moving trawler for long periods of time presented enormous challenges. Injuries and fatalities were relatively high in this line of work, especially during stormy weather. Trawlers sometimes capsized at sea and entire crews perished.Fishermen's unions struggled valiantly to protect their members’ interests, but only those of the New Englanders had much success. The reason was partly structural. Ignoring old craft traditions, the Americans established unions that included skippers and engineers as well as deckhands and cooks. As a result, the men had more power vis-à-vis shipowners than their British counterparts did. On both sides of the Atlantic, however, getting fishermen to support union goals proved challenging. The men were often at sea and rarely wanted to spend their shore time involved in union activities. Trade union leaders were typically more militant than the rank and file, and union victories hinged largely on their own dedication and hard work.Unlike other labor studies, this book shows how workers’ wives helped to solve industry-wide problems. In chapter 4, for example, readers learn how a group of British women who had lost their husbands at sea protested the lack of safety standards in the fishing business. Speaking publicly about the problem, the women complained that British trawlers often headed out to sea without reliable communication equipment, or even basic medical supplies. The women's speeches drew nationwide attention and eventually shamed shipowners and lawmakers into improving safety conditions. In New England, fishermen's wives created local organizations that highlighted the importance of fishing to coastal economies and thus justified the exclusion of foreign fishing fleets from coastal waters. In 1976, the women garnered support for the Magnuson Fisheries Conservation Act, which significantly extended America's territorial fishing limits and thereby protected their husbands’ jobs.The politics of exclusion occasionally spark","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}