Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged labor movement

Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City

The concept for Jane Latour’s book, Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York, was initially a brochure. While serving as the director of the Women’s Project of the Brooklyn-based Association for Union Democracy (AUD), Latour had the opportunity to interview women who were working in non-traditional blue-collar trades.

Schmatta: From Rags to Riches to Rags

It has become cliche to tell the story of an American going from rags to riches based on their own impassioned journey using a unique and personal form of ingenuity and hard work, but we may be on the path toward establishing a new and unfortunate conventional wisdom that says it is just as common to go from rags to riches and then back to rags once again. It is this new economic reality that Schmatta: From Rags to Riches to Rags explores in ways that are both haunting and saddening.

Gold Dust on His Shirt: The True Story of an Immigrant Mining Family

When you think about migrant memoirs of North America, stories of moving north from Latin America often come to mind more than those detailing moves east and west. Flipping around that common assumption, Gold Dust on His Shirt tells the story of Irene Howard’s Swedish-Norwegian immigrant family’s tumultuous life in Canada at the turn of the twentieth century. After the death of her first husband in Norway, Howard’s mother Ingeborg immigrated to Canada.

Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America

Originally published in 1931, Dynamite hearkens back to an era of American capitalism a little less glossy, a little bloodier, and with striking parallels to today. In this account, Adamic provided one of the first overviews of U.S. labor history to that point, although his narrative is clearly not intended to be comprehensive, but rather focuses on the role of violence in the movements.