Reinventing Free Labor

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521778190
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (781 download)

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Book Synopsis Reinventing Free Labor by : Gunther Peck

Download or read book Reinventing Free Labor written by Gunther Peck and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-05-22 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most infamous villains in North America during the Progressive Era was the padrone, a mafia-like immigrant boss who allegedly enslaved his compatriots and kept them uncivilized, unmanly, and unfree. In this history of the padrone, first published in 2000, Gunther Peck analyzes the figure's deep cultural resonance by examining the lives of three padrones and the workers they imported to North America. He argues that the padrones were not primitive men but rather thoroughly modern entrepreneurs who used corporations, the labour contract, and the right to quit to create far-flung coercive networks. Drawing on Greek, Spanish, and Italian language sources, Peck analyzes how immigrant workers emancipated themselves using the tools of padrone power to their own advantage.

The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor

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Publisher : Texas A&M University Press
ISBN 13 : 1603443401
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (34 download)

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Book Synopsis The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor by : Theresa Ann Case

Download or read book The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor written by Theresa Ann Case and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Italian Immigration in the American West

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Publisher : University of Nevada Press
ISBN 13 : 1647790034
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (477 download)

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Book Synopsis Italian Immigration in the American West by : Kenneth Scambray

Download or read book Italian Immigration in the American West written by Kenneth Scambray and published by University of Nevada Press. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this carefully researched and engaging book, Kenneth Scambray surveys the lives and contributions of Italian immigrants in thirteen western states. He covers a variety of topics, including the role of the Roman Catholic Church in attracting and facilitating Italian settlement; the economic, political, and cultural contributions made by Italians; and the efforts to preserve Italian culture and to restore connections to their ancestral identity. The lives of immigrants in the West differed greatly from those of their counterparts on the East Coast in many ways. The development of the West—with its cheap land and mining, forestry, and agriculture industries\--created a demand for labor that enabled newcomers to achieve stability and success. Moreover, female immigrants had many more opportunities to contribute materially to their family’s well-being, either by overseeing new revenue streams for their farms and small businesses, or as paid workers outside the home. Despite this success, Italian immigrants in the West could not escape the era’s xenophobia. Scambray also discusses the ways that Italians, perceived by many as non-White, interacted with other Euro-Americans, other immigrant groups, and Native Americans and African Americans. By placing the Italian immigrant experience within the context of other immigrant narratives, Italian Immigration in the American West provides rich insights into the lives and contributions of individuals and families who sought to build new lives in the West. This unique study reveals the impact of Italian immigration and the immense diversity of the immigrant experience outside the East’s urban centers.

From All Points

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Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253027969
Total Pages : 648 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis From All Points by : Elliott Robert Barkan

Download or read book From All Points written by Elliott Robert Barkan and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-11 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of immigrants in the American West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and their effect on the region. At a time when immigration policy is the subject of heated debate, this book makes clear that the true wealth of America is in the diversity of its peoples. By the end of the twentieth century, the American West was home to nearly half of America’s immigrant population, including Asians and Armenians, Germans and Greeks, Mexicans, Italians, Swedes, Basques, and others. This book tells their rich and complex story—of adaptation and isolation, maintaining and mixing traditions, and an ongoing ebb and flow of movement, assimilation, and replenishment. These immigrants and their children built communities, added to the region’s culture, and contended with discrimination and the lure of Americanization. The mark of the outsider, the alien, the nonwhite passed from group to group, even as the complexion of the region changed. The region welcomed, then excluded, immigrants, in restless waves of need and nativism that continue to this day. “Written in the fashion of Oscar Handlin, this study makes a convincing case that immigration history comprises an essential part of the history of the American West, and that appreciation of the former and the roles played by myriad alien arrivals is essential for understanding the latter. . . . Barkan . . . combines vignettes based on immigrant reminiscences with keen analysis to explore four related themes: various groups’ arrivals, their economic influences, their effects on public policy, and their adaptation and assimilation. The resulting narrative is readable and informative. . . . Recommended.” —Choice “A remarkable synthesis of the West as a region of immigrants. It tells the story of how vital immigrants were to economic growth and modernization. This will be the prime reference for 21st century scholars of immigration and ethnicity in the American West.” —Annals of Wyoming, Spring 2010

Reinventing the Workplace

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Publisher : Brookings Institution Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Reinventing the Workplace by : David I. Levine

Download or read book Reinventing the Workplace written by David I. Levine and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Levine concludes with specific public policy recommendations for increasing the extent of employee involvement, including changes in government regulation of capital and labor markets to encourage long-term investment and labor-management cooperation. He recommends macroeconomic policies to sustain high employment, less regulation for high-involvement workplaces, and training in schools and on the job to teach high-involvement practices.

Reinventing Eden

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0415644259
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (156 download)

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Book Synopsis Reinventing Eden by : Carolyn Merchant

Download or read book Reinventing Eden written by Carolyn Merchant and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visionary quests to return to the Garden of Eden have shaped Western culture from Columbus' voyages to today's tropical island retreats. Few narratives are so powerful - and, as Carolyn Merchant shows, so misguided and destructive - as the dream of recapturing a lost paradise. A sweeping account of these quixotic endeavors by one of America's leading environmentalists, Reinventing Eden traces the idea of rebuilding the primeval garden from its origins to its latest incarnations in shopping malls, theme parks and gated communities. With eloquence and insight, Merchant shows how the drive to conquer nature and to explore and settle the globe, springs from this utopian pastoral impulse throughout Western history. Time and again, human manipulation of the environment is our downfall: Eden is achieved by fencing off pristine beauty in national parks and wildlife preserves, while leaving the majority of the earth in ruins. Challenging both narratives, Merchant argues that the green veneer of city-park conservation has become a cover for the corruption of the earth and the neglect of its environment. Reinventing Eden is a bold new way to think about the earth that includes green political parties, sustainable development and a partnership between humans and earth that is nothing short of an ecological revolution.

Rethinking the American Labor Movement

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Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1136175512
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (361 download)

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Book Synopsis Rethinking the American Labor Movement by : Elizabeth Faue

Download or read book Rethinking the American Labor Movement written by Elizabeth Faue and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking the American Labor Movement tells the story of the various groups and incidents that make up what we think of as the "labor movement." While the efforts of the American labor force towards greater wealth parity have been rife with contention, the struggle has embraced a broad vision of a more equitable distribution of the nation’s wealth and a desire for workers to have greater control over their own lives. In this succinct and authoritative volume, Elizabeth Faue reconsiders the varied strains of the labor movement, situating them within the context of rapidly transforming twentieth-century American society to show how these efforts have formed a political and social movement that has shaped the trajectory of American life. Rethinking the American Labor Movement is indispensable reading for scholars and students interested in American labor in the twentieth century and in the interplay between labor, wealth, and power.

Handbook Global History of Work

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Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110424703
Total Pages : 719 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis Handbook Global History of Work by : Karin Hofmeester

Download or read book Handbook Global History of Work written by Karin Hofmeester and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 719 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coffee from East Africa, wine from California, chocolate from the Ivory Coast - all those every day products are based on labour, often produced under appalling conditions, but always involving the combination of various work processes we are often not aware of. What is the day-to-day reality for workers in various parts of the world, and how was it in the past? How do they work today, and how did they work in the past? These and many other questions comprise the field of the global history of work – a young discipline that is introduced with this handbook. In 8 thematic chapters, this book discusses these aspects of work in a global and long term perspective, paying attention to several kinds of work. Convict labour, slave and wage labour, labour migration, and workers of the textile industry, but also workers' organisation, strikes, and motivations for work are part of this first handbook of global labour history, written by the most renowned scholars of the profession.

On Strike and on Film

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Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469606542
Total Pages : 366 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

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Book Synopsis On Strike and on Film by : Ellen R. Baker

Download or read book On Strike and on Film written by Ellen R. Baker and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1950, Mexican American miners went on strike for fair working conditions in Hanover, New Mexico. When an injunction prohibited miners from picketing, their wives took over the picket lines--an unprecedented act that disrupted mining families but ultimately ensured the strikers' victory in 1952. In On Strike and on Film, Ellen Baker examines the building of a leftist union that linked class justice to ethnic equality. She shows how women's participation in union activities paved the way for their taking over the picket lines and thereby forcing their husbands, and the union, to face troubling questions about gender equality. Baker also explores the collaboration between mining families and blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers that resulted in the controversial 1954 film Salt of the Earth. She shows how this worker-artist alliance gave the mining families a unique chance to clarify the meanings of the strike in their own lives and allowed the filmmakers to create a progressive alternative to Hollywood productions. An inspiring story of working-class solidarity, Mexican American dignity, and women's liberation, Salt of the Earth was itself blacklisted by powerful anticommunists, yet the movie has endured as a vital contribution to American cinema.

Repositioning North American Migration History

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Publisher : University Rochester Press
ISBN 13 : 9781580461580
Total Pages : 460 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (615 download)

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Book Synopsis Repositioning North American Migration History by : Marc S. Rodriguez

Download or read book Repositioning North American Migration History written by Marc S. Rodriguez and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look at trends in North American internal migration. This volume gathers established and new scholars working on North American immigration, transmigration, internal migration, and citizenship whose work analyzes the development of migrant and state-level institutions as well as migrant networks. With contemporary migration research most often focused on the development of transnational communities and the ways international migrants maintain relationships with their sending region that sustain the circularflow of people, ideas, and traditions across national boundaries it is useful to compare these to similar patterns evident within the terrain of internal migration. To date, however, international and internal migration studies have unfolded in relative isolation from one another with each operating within these distinct fields of expertise rather than across them. Although there has been some important linking, there has not been a recent major consideration of human migration that works across and within the various borders of the North American continent. Thus, the volume presents a variety of chapters that seek to consider human migration in comparative perspective across the internal/international divide. Marc S. Rodriguez is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University; Donna R. Gabbaccia is the Mellon Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh; James R. Grossman is theVice President of Research and Education at the Newberry Library, Chicago. Contributors: Josef Barton, Wallace Best, Donna Gabbaccia, James Gregory, Tobias Higbie, Mae Ngai, Walter Nugent, Annelise Orleck, Kunal Parker, Kimberly Phillips, Bruno Ramirez, Marc Rodriguez Repositioning North American Migration History is a volume in Studies in Comparative History, sponsored by Princeton University's Shelby Cullom Davis Center forHistorical Studies.

A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107008794
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction by : Laura F. Edwards

Download or read book A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction written by Laura F. Edwards and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a succinct and accessible account of the critical role of legal and constitutional issues of the American Civil War.

Reconstructions

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199723974
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

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Book Synopsis Reconstructions by : Thomas J. Brown

Download or read book Reconstructions written by Thomas J. Brown and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-23 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pivotal era of Reconstruction has inspired an outstanding historical literature. In the half-century after W.E.B. DuBois published Black Reconstruction in America (1935), a host of thoughtful and energetic authors helped to dismantle racist stereotypes about the aftermath of emancipation and Union victory in the Civil War. The resolution of long-running interpretive debates shifted the issues at stake in Reconstruction scholarship, but the topic has remained a vital venue for original exploration of the American past. In Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States, eight rising historians survey the latest generation of work and point to promising directions for future research. They show that the field is opening out to address a wider range of adjustments to the experiences and effects of Civil War. Increased interest in cultural history now enriches understandings traditionally centered on social and political history. Attention to gender has joined a focus on labor as a powerful strategy for analyzing negotiations over private and public authority. The contributors suggest that Reconstruction historiography might further thrive by strengthening connections to such subjects as western history, legal history, and diplomatic history, and by redefining the chronological boundaries of the postwar period. The essays provide more than a variety of attractive vantage points for fresh examination of a major phase of American history. By identifying the most exciting recent approaches to a theme previously studied so ably, the collection illuminates the creative process in scholarly historical literature.

Steel Barrio

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Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814724655
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (147 download)

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Book Synopsis Steel Barrio by : Michael Innis-Jiménez

Download or read book Steel Barrio written by Michael Innis-Jiménez and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-06-24 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The richly documented history of Mexican South Chicago here yields a sophisticated, rounded, and compelling study of the evolution of an immigrant place. Attentive to structural factors shaping migration and assimilation, Innis-Jiménez also tells textured human stories of the work, play, and solidarity that created and recreated an enduring community, snatching life from discrimination and hardship." —David Roediger, University of Illinois Since the early twentieth century, thousands of Mexican Americans have lived, worked, and formed communities in Chicago’s steel mill neighborhoods. Drawing on individual stories and oral histories, Michael Innis-Jiménez tells the story of a vibrant, active community that continues to play a central role in American politics and society. Examining how the fortunes of Mexicans in South Chicago were linked to the environment they helped to build, Steel Barrio offers new insights into how and why Mexican Americans created community. This book investigates the years between the World Wars, the period that witnessed the first, massive influx of Mexicans into Chicago. South Chicago Mexicans lived in a neighborhood whose literal and figurative boundaries were defined by steel mills, which dominated economic life for Mexican immigrants. Yet while the mills provided jobs for Mexican men, they were neither the center of community life nor the source of collective identity. Steel Barrio argues that the Mexican immigrant and Mexican American men and women who came to South Chicago created physical and imagined community not only to defend against the ever-present social, political, and economic harassment and discrimination, but to grow in a foreign, polluted environment. Steel Barrio reconstructs the everyday strategies the working-class Mexican American community adopted to survive in areas from labor to sports to activism. This book links a particular community in South Chicago to broader issues in twentieth-century U.S. history, including race and labor, urban immigration, and the segregation of cities. Michael Innis-Jiménez is a native of Laredo, Texas and Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Alabama. He lives in Tuscaloosa where he working on his next book on Latino/a immigration to the American South. In the Culture, Labor, History series

The Education Trap

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Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674249119
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis The Education Trap by : Cristina Viviana Groeger

Download or read book The Education Trap written by Cristina Viviana Groeger and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why—contrary to much expert and popular opinion—more education may not be the answer to skyrocketing inequality. For generations, Americans have looked to education as the solution to economic disadvantage. Yet, although more people are earning degrees, the gap between rich and poor is widening. Cristina Groeger delves into the history of this seeming contradiction, explaining how education came to be seen as a panacea even as it paved the way for deepening inequality. The Education Trap returns to the first decades of the twentieth century, when Americans were grappling with the unprecedented inequities of the Gilded Age. Groeger’s test case is the city of Boston, which spent heavily on public schools. She examines how workplaces came to depend on an army of white-collar staff, largely women and second-generation immigrants, trained in secondary schools. But Groeger finds that the shift to more educated labor had negative consequences—both intended and unintended—for many workers. Employers supported training in schools in order to undermine the influence of craft unions, and so shift workplace power toward management. And advanced educational credentials became a means of controlling access to high-paying professional and business jobs, concentrating power and wealth. Formal education thus became a central force in maintaining inequality. The idea that more education should be the primary means of reducing inequality may be appealing to politicians and voters, but Groeger warns that it may be a dangerous policy trap. If we want a more equitable society, we should not just prescribe more time in the classroom, but fight for justice in the workplace.

Managed Migrations

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Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 1477316140
Total Pages : 287 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (773 download)

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Book Synopsis Managed Migrations by : Cristina Salinas

Download or read book Managed Migrations written by Cristina Salinas and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2018-11-14 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Needed at one moment, scorned at others, Mexican agricultural workers have moved back and forth across the US–Mexico border for the past century. In South Texas, Anglo growers’ dreams of creating a modern agricultural empire depended on continuous access to Mexican workers. While this access was officially regulated by immigration laws and policy promulgated in Washington, DC, in practice the migration of Mexican labor involved daily, on-the-ground negotiations among growers, workers, and the US Border Patrol. In a very real sense, these groups set the parameters of border enforcement policy. Managed Migrations examines the relationship between immigration laws and policy and the agricultural labor relations of growers and workers in South Texas and El Paso during the 1940s and 1950s. Cristina Salinas argues that immigration law was mainly enacted not in embassies or the halls of Congress but on the ground, as a result of daily decisions by the Border Patrol that growers and workers negotiated and contested. She describes how the INS devised techniques to facilitate high-volume yearly deportations and shows how the agency used these enforcement practices to manage the seasonal agricultural labor migration across the border. Her pioneering research reveals the great extent to which immigration policy was made at the local level, as well as the agency of Mexican farmworkers who managed to maintain their mobility and kinship networks despite the constraints of grower paternalism and enforcement actions by the Border Patrol.

Bleeding Borders

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Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807148768
Total Pages : 341 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Bleeding Borders by : Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel

Download or read book Bleeding Borders written by Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bleeding Borders, Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel offers a fresh, multifaceted interpretation of the quintessential sectional conflict in pre--Civil War Kansas. Instead of focusing on the white, male politicians and settlers who vied for control of the Kansas territorial legislature, Oertel explores the crucial roles Native Americans, African Americans, and white women played in the literal and rhetorical battle between proslavery and antislavery settlers in the region. She brings attention to the local debates and the diverse peoples who participated in them during that contentious period. Oertel begins by detailing the settlement of eastern Kansas by emigrant Indian tribes and explores their interaction with the growing number of white settlers in the region. She analyzes the attempts by southerners to plant slavery in Kansas and the ultimately successful resistance of slaves and abolitionists. Oertel then considers how crude frontier living conditions, Indian conflict, political upheaval, and sectional violence reshaped traditional Victorian gender roles in Kansas and explores women's participation in the political and physical conflicts between proslavery and antislavery settlers. Oertel goes on to examine northern and southern definitions of "true manhood" and how competing ideas of masculinity infused political and sectional tensions. She concludes with an analysis of miscegenation -- not only how racial mixing between Indians, slaves, and whites influenced events in territorial Kansas, but more importantly, how the fear of miscegenation fueled both proslavery and antislavery arguments about the need for civil war. As Oertel demonstrates, the players in Bleeding Kansas used weapons other than their Sharpes rifles and Bowie knives to wage war over the extension of slavery: they attacked each other's cultural values and struggled to assert their own political wills. They jealously guarded ideals of manhood, womanhood, and whiteness even as the presence of Indians and blacks and the debate over slavery raised serious questions about the efficacy of these principles. Oertel argues that, ultimately, many Native Americans, blacks, and women shaped the political and cultural terrain in ways that ensured the destruction of slavery, but they, along with their white male counterparts, failed to defeat the resilient power of white supremacy. Moving beyond a conventional political history of Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Borders breaks new ground by revealing how the struggles of this highly diverse region contributed to the national move toward disunion and how the ideologies that governed race and gender relations were challenged as North, South, and West converged on the border between slavery and freedom.

Born with a Copper Spoon

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Publisher : UBC Press
ISBN 13 : 0774865059
Total Pages : 366 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (748 download)

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Book Synopsis Born with a Copper Spoon by : Robrecht Declercq

Download or read book Born with a Copper Spoon written by Robrecht Declercq and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past two centuries, industrial societies hungry for copper – essential for light, power, and communication – have demanded ever-increasing quantities of the metal. Born with a Copper Spoon examines how the metal has been produced, distributed, controlled, and sold on a global scale. However, this is not simply a narrative of ever-increasing and deepening global connections. It is also about periods of deglobalization, fragmentation, and attempts to sever connections. Throughout history, copper production has spawned its own practices, technologies, and a constantly changing political economy. Large-scale production has affected ecologies, states, and companies, while creating and even destroying local communities dependent on volatile commodity markets. Former president of Zambia Kenneth Kaunda once remarked that Zambians were “born with a copper spoon in our mouths,” but few societies managed to profit from copper’s abundance. From copper cartels and the futures market to the consequences of resource nationalism, Born with a Copper Spoon delivers a global perspective on one of the world’s most important metals.