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Doing working-class history : research, heritage, and engagement
\"Economic and political uncertainty has brought the language of class-especially discussion of the working class-to a broad audience across scholarship and social debate. This introductory volume shows how the history of the working class has, is, and can be researched, written, and represented. The book is structured in three parts: Perspective, Context, and Application. Each offers an introduction to both classic historiography and new ideas and methodologies. With chapters covering a span of the years c.1750 - present, the book focuses on three essential questions: 1. What is working-class history and what should it become? 2. What can a focus on working-class history reveal? 3. What are the possibilities of this research in the University classroom, the heritage world, and beyond? Doing Working-Class History will appeal to students and scholars of working-class history, whether relative newcomers to the field or veteran researchers interested in new approaches and material. It will also be of interest to local and family historians, museum and heritage professionals, and general readers\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
The Rise of Professional Society
The Rise of Professional Society lays out a stimulating and controversial framework for the study of British society, challenging accepted paradigms based on class analysis. Perkins argues that the non-capitalist \"professional class\" represents a new principle of social organization based on trained expertise and meritocracy, a \"forgotten middle class\" conveniently overlooked by classical social theorists.
'A true magnum opus. No social historian can afford not to read it.' – Asa Briggs 'Accessible to the general reader, indispensable to the scholar and a solid achievement of synthesis and clarity.' – The Observer
eBook
American misfits and the making of middle-class respectability
\"The quest for middle-class respectability in nineteenth-century America is usually described as a process of inculcating positive values such as honesty, hard work, independence, and cultural refinement. But clergy, educators, and community leaders also defined respectability negatively, by maligning individuals and groups--'misfits'--who deviated from accepted norms. Robert Wuthnow argues that respectability is constructed by 'othering' people who do not fit into easily recognizable, socially approved categories. He demonstrates this through an in-depth examination of a wide variety of individuals and groups that became objects of derision. We meet a disabled Civil War veteran who worked as a huckster on the edges of the frontier, the wife of a lunatic who raised her family while her husband was institutionalized, an immigrant religious community accused of sedition, and a wealthy scion charged with profiteering. Unlike respected Americans who marched confidently toward worldly and heavenly success, such misfits were usually ignored in paeans about the nation. But they played an important part in the cultural work that made America, and their story is essential for understanding the 'othering' that remains so much a part of American culture and politics today.\" -- Provided by the publisher.
Book
Against the Law
This study opens a critical perspective on the slow death of socialism and the rebirth of capitalism in the world's most dynamic and populous country. Based on remarkable fieldwork and extensive interviews in Chinese textile, apparel, machinery, and household appliance factories, Against the Law finds a rising tide of labor unrest mostly hidden from the world's attention. Providing a broad political and economic analysis of this labor struggle together with fine-grained ethnographic detail, the book portrays the Chinese working class as workers' stories unfold in bankrupt state factories and global sweatshops, in crowded dormitories and remote villages, at street protests as well as in quiet disenchantment with the corrupt officialdom and the fledgling legal system.
eBook
Bridging the Divide
In Bridging the
Divide , Jack Metzgar attempts to determine
the differences between working-class and middle-class cultures in
the United States. Drawing on a wide range of
multidisciplinary sources, Metzgar writes as a now middle-class
professional with a working-class upbringing, explaining the
various ways the two cultures conflict and complement each other,
illustrated by his own lived experiences.
Set in a historical framework that reflects on how both class
cultures developed, adapted, and survived through decades of
historical circumstances, Metzgar challenges professional
middle-class views of both the working-class and themselves. In the
end, he argues for the creation of a cross-class coalition of what
he calls \"standard-issue professionals\" with both hard-living and
settled-living working people and outlines some policies that could
help promote such a unification if the two groups had a better
understanding of their differences and how to use those differences
to their advantage.
Bridging the Divide mixes personal stories and
theoretical concepts to give us a compelling look inside the
current complex position of the working-class in American culture
and a view of what it could be in the future.
eBook
The global bourgeoisie : the rise of the middle classes in the age of empire
While the nineteenth century has been described as the golden age of the European bourgeoisie, the emergence of the middle class and bourgeois culture was by no means exclusive to Europe. The global bourgeoisie explores the rise of the middle classes around the world during the age of empire. Bringing together eminent scholars, this landmark essay collection compares middle-class formation in various regions, highlighting differences and similarities, and assesses the extent to which bourgeois growth was tied to the increasing exchange of ideas and goods. The contributors indicate that the middle class was from its very beginning, even in Europe, the result of international connections and entanglements. Essays are grouped into six thematic sections: the political history of middle-class formation, the impact of imperial rule on the colonial middle class, the role of capitalism, the influence of religion, the obstacles to the middle class beyond the Western and colonial world, and, lastly, reflections on the creation of bourgeois cultures and global social history. Placing the establishment of middle-class society into historical context, this book shows how the triumph or destabilization of bourgeois values can shape the liberal world order. The Global Bourgeoisie irrevocably changes the understanding of how an important social class came to be.
Book
Falling behind
With a timely new foreword by Robert Frank, this groundbreaking book explores the very meaning of happiness and prosperity in America today. Although middle-income families don't earn much more than they did several decades ago, they are buying bigger cars, houses, and appliances. To pay for them, they spend more than they earn and carry record levels of debt. Robert Frank explains how increased concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the economic pyramid have set off \"expenditure cascades\" that raise the cost of achieving many basic goals for the middle class. Writing in lively prose for a general audience, Frank employs up-to-date economic data and examples drawn from everyday life to shed light on reigning models of consumer behavior. He also suggests reforms that could mitigate the costs of inequality. Falling Behind compels us to rethink how and why we live our economic lives the way we do.
eBook
Blue-Chip Black
As Karyn R. Lacy's innovative work in the suburbs of Washington, DC, reveals, there is a continuum of middle-classness among blacks, ranging from lower-middle class to middle-middle class to upper-middle class. Focusing on the latter two, Lacy explores an increasingly important social and demographic group: middle-class blacks who live in middle-class suburbs where poor blacks are not present. These \"blue-chip black\" suburbanites earn well over fifty thousand dollars annually and work in predominantly white professional environments. Lacy examines the complicated sense of identity that individuals in these groups craft to manage their interactions with lower-class blacks, middle-class whites, and other middle-class blacks as they seek to reap the benefits of their middle-class status.
eBook