Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
84
result(s) for
"United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918"
Sort by:
Gender, race and family in nineteenth century America : from northern woman to plantation mistress
Sarah Hicks Williams was the northern-born wife of an antebellum slaveholder. Rebecca Fraser traces her journey as she relocates to Clifton Grove, the Williams' slaveholding plantation, presenting her with complex dilemmas as she reconciled her new role as plantation mistress to the gender script she had been raised with in the North.
eBook
Daily life in the industrial United States, 1870-1900
\"Not just about the rise of the factories or the emergence of the modern city, this fascinating history conveys how it felt to work the assembly line and walk the bustling urban streets. Provides an overview of the dramatic economic changes occurring in the United States during industrialization, especially in the textile, meatpacking, steel, and railroad industries; Describes a political culture marked by high participation rates in the North, active suppression of the African American vote in the South, and a youth culture that made voting an important male rite of passage; Offers primary documents that invite readers to consider contrasting positions on a variety of issues, including how white supremacists justified violence and suppression of the black vote and how African American activists spoke out to resist this; Explores a variety of educational models, including manual education, Montessori education, and single-sex education, that resonate with contemporary debates on education.\"--Publisher's description.
Book
American Abyss
At the beginning of the twentieth century, industrialization both dramatically altered everyday experiences and shaped debates about the effects of immigration, empire, and urbanization. InAmerican Abyss, Daniel E. Bender examines an array of sources-eugenics theories, scientific studies of climate, socialist theory, and even popular novels about cavemen-to show how intellectuals and activists came to understand industrialization in racial and gendered terms as the product of evolution and as the highest expression of civilization.
Their discussions, he notes, are echoed today by the use of such terms as the \"developed\" and \"developing\" worlds. American industry was contrasted with the supposed savagery and primitivism discovered in tropical colonies, but observers who made those claims worried that industrialization, by encouraging immigration, child and women's labor, and large families, was reversing natural selection. Factories appeared to favor the most unfit. There was a disturbing tendency for such expressions of fear to favor eugenicist \"remedies.\"
Bender delves deeply into the culture and politics of the age of industry. Linking urban slum tourism and imperial science with immigrant better-baby contests and hoboes,American Abyssuncovers the complex interactions of turn-of-the-century ideas about race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Moreover, at a time when immigration again lies at the center of American economy and society, this book offers an alarming and pointed historical perspective on contemporary fears of immigrant laborers.
eBook
The Labor Question in America
In The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age, Rosanne Currarino traces the struggle to define the nature of democratic life in an era of industrial strife. As Americans confronted the glaring disparity between democracy's promises of independence and prosperity and the grim realities of economic want and wage labor, they asked, \"What should constitute full participation in American society? What standard of living should citizens expect and demand?\" Currarino traces the diverse efforts to answer these questions, from the fledgling trade union movement to contests over immigration, from economic theory to popular literature, from legal debates to social reform. The contradictory answers that emerged--one stressing economic participation in a consumer society, the other emphasizing property ownership and self-reliance--remain pressing today as contemporary scholars, journalists, and social critics grapple with the meaning of democracy in postindustrial America.
eBook
From Abolition to Rights for All
The Civil War was not the end, as is often thought, of reformist activism among abolitionists. After emancipation was achieved, they broadened their struggle to pursue equal rights for women, state medicine, workers' rights, fair wages, immigrants' rights, care of the poor, and a right to decent housing and a healthy environment. Focusing on the work of a key group of activists from 1835 to the dawn of the twentieth century,From Abolition to Rights for Allinvestigates how reformers, linked together and radicalized by their shared experiences in the abolitionist struggle, articulated a core natural rights ideology and molded it into a rationale for successive reform movements. The book follows the abolitionists' struggles and successes in organizing a social movement. For a time after the Civil War these reformers occupied major positions of power, only to be rebuffed in the later years of the nineteenth century as the larger society rejected their inclusive understanding of natural rights. The narrative of perseverance among this small group would be a continuing source of inspiration for reform. The pattern they established-local organization, expansive vision, and eventual challenge by powerful business interests and individuals-would be mirrored shortly thereafter by Progressives.
eBook
Racism and sexual oppression in Anglo-America : a genealogy
Does the black struggle for civil rights make common cause with the movement to foster queer community, protest anti-queer violence or discrimination, and demand respect for the rights and sensibilities of queer people? Confronting this emotionally charged question, Ladelle McWhorter reveals how a carefully structured campaign against abnormality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries encouraged white Americans to purge society of so-called biological contaminants, people who were poor, disabled, black, or queer. Building on a legacy of savage hate crimes -- such as the killings of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd -- McWhorter shows that racism, sexual oppression, and discrimination against the disabled, the feeble, and the poor are all aspects of the same societal distemper, and that when the civil rights of one group are challenged, so are the rights of all.
eBook