Streets Railroads And The Great Strike Of 1877

Author : David O. Stowell
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 198 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 1999-06-15
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0226776689

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Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877 by David O. Stowell Pdf

For one week in late July of 1877, America shook with anger and fear as a variety of urban residents, mostly working class, attacked railroad property in dozens of towns and cities. The Great Strike of 1877 was one of the largest and most violent urban uprisings in American history. Whereas most historians treat the event solely as a massive labor strike that targeted the railroads, David O. Stowell examines America's predicament more broadly to uncover the roots of this rebellion. He studies the urban origins of the Strike in three upstate New York cities—Buffalo, Albany, and Syracuse. He finds that locomotives rumbled through crowded urban spaces, sending panicked horses and their wagons careening through streets. Hundreds of people were killed and injured with appalling regularity. The trains also disrupted street traffic and obstructed certain forms of commerce. For these reasons, Stowell argues, The Great Strike was not simply an uprising fueled by disgruntled workers. Rather, it was a grave reflection of one of the most direct and damaging ways many people experienced the Industrial Revolution. "Through meticulously crafted case studies . . . the author advances the thesis that the strike had urban roots, that in substantial part it represented a community uprising. . . .A particular strength of the book is Stowell's description of the horrendous accidents, the toll in human life, and the continual disruption of craft, business, and ordinary movement engendered by building railroads into the heart of cities."—Charles N. Glaab, American Historical Review

Author : David Omar Stowell
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Grève des cheminots, États-Unis, 1877
ISBN : 9780252074776

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The Great Strikes of 1877 by David Omar Stowell Pdf

New perspectives on a pivotal moment in U.S. history

Author : David Omar Stowell
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : American newspapers
ISBN : WISC:89063263057

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The Struggle for City Streets by David Omar Stowell Pdf

Author : David O. Stowell
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2024-02-12
Category : Transportation
ISBN : 9780252056352

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The Great Strikes of 1877 by David O. Stowell Pdf

A spectacular example of collective protest, the Great Strike of 1877--actually a sequence of related actions--was America's first national strike and the first major strike against the railroad industry. In some places, non-railroad workers also abandoned city businesses, creating one of the nation's first general strikes. Mobilizing hundreds of thousands of workers, the Great Strikes of 1877 transformed the nation's political landscape, shifting the primary political focus from Reconstruction to labor, capital, and the changing role of the state. Probing essays by distinguished historians explore the social, political, regional, and ethnic landscape of the Great Strikes of 1877: long-term effects on state militias and national guard units; ethnic and class characterization of strikers; pictorial representations of poor laborers in the press; organizational strategies employed by railroad workers; participation by blacks; violence against Chinese immigrants; and the developing tension between capitalism and racial equality in the United States. Contributors: Joshua Brown, Steven J. Hoffman, Michael Kazin, David Miller, Richard Schneirov, David O. Stowell, and Shelton Stromquist.

Author : Ann Norton GREENE,Ann Norton Greene
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2009-06-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780674037908

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Horses at Work by Ann Norton GREENE,Ann Norton Greene Pdf

Greene argues for recognition of horses’ critical contribution to the history of American energy and the rise of American industrial power, and a new understanding of the reasons for their replacement as prime movers.

Author : William Dean Howells
Publisher : Jazzybee Verlag
Page : 515 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2020
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9783849657499

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A Hazard Of New Fortunes by William Dean Howells Pdf

No one can complain that in this story Mr. Howells has taken his type from the commonplace. It is a study of life in New York, and the author has brought together such a gallery of odd and strongly differentiated characters as could perhaps be found in no other city on the continent, while the conditions and phases of social life represented are not less distinctive and peculiar. The Marches, it is true, are from Boston, but they serve the purpose of external points of observation, whence to note and sufficiently to emphasize those features of our city life which of necessity strike strangers and outsiders most forcibly and with the greatest freshness of suggestion. A new magazine is founded with the money of old Dryfoos, a "natural gas millionaire," whose primary object is to give his son Conrad — a youth of saint-like character and dominant altruism — opportunity to become a businessman. The prime mover of the venture is Fulkerson, a true Western Yankee, if the phrase be allowable, whose engaging impudence, fluent slang, indomitable assurance, and substantial loyalty and goodness of heart are sure to make him as great a favorite with the reader as he is with all who know him in the story. The Marches, too, are fantastic, and nowhere has Mr. Howells better presented that peculiar American humor which finds motives for half-sarcastic jest and quip in even the most serious things, less out of lightness of heart than from an almost desperate conscious ness of hopeless incongruities and perplexities inherent in the general scheme. The picture is in itself a condemnation of and protest against that rank growth of naked materialism which is the most depressing feature of our time. The character and the faults of society are shown plainly but temperately — the spirit of levity, the love of spectacle, the repugnance to serious thinking, the absence of jealousy of popular rights, constantly encroached upon, ignored and subordinated to selfish corporate or individual interests. The aspects of the city are also most graphically and admirably described in many a wandering of the Marches, and the book exhibits an amount of local study undertaken by the author which speaks well for his conscientiousness, and adds much to the charm and permanent interest of the story. There is, as we have intimated, an unwonted variety and an unwonted force in " A Hazard of New Fortunes." If it can hardly be said to have a dominant note, it is none the less a faithful and carefully elaborated study of New York life, and it presents some of the most salient characteristics of that life in a very impressive and artistic manner. Most readers will, we think, agree with us that the change in method here shown is a change for the better. Never, certainly, has Mr. Howells written more brilliantly, more clearly, more firmly, or more attractively, than in this instance. The reversion to these strong individualizations seems to have put new vigor into his hands, and he deals with the deeper tragedies, the graver emotions of life, with a power which may perhaps be regarded as a practical demonstration of the ultimate supremacy destined to be attained by Nature over Art ; by the true over the false Realism.

Author : Richard White
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 912 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2017-08-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9780190619060

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The Republic for Which It Stands by Richard White Pdf

The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multivolume history of the American nation. In the newest volume in the series, The Republic for Which It Stands, acclaimed historian Richard White offers a fresh and integrated interpretation of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as the seedbed of modern America. At the end of the Civil War the leaders and citizens of the victorious North envisioned the country's future as a free-labor republic, with a homogenous citizenry, both black and white. The South and West were to be reconstructed in the image of the North. Thirty years later Americans occupied an unimagined world. The unity that the Civil War supposedly secured had proved ephemeral. The country was larger, richer, and more extensive, but also more diverse. Life spans were shorter, and physical well-being had diminished, due to disease and hazardous working conditions. Independent producers had become wage earners. The country was Catholic and Jewish as well as Protestant, and increasingly urban and industrial. The "dangerous" classes of the very rich and poor expanded, and deep differences -- ethnic, racial, religious, economic, and political -- divided society. The corruption that gave the Gilded Age its name was pervasive. These challenges also brought vigorous efforts to secure economic, moral, and cultural reforms. Real change -- technological, cultural, and political -- proliferated from below more than emerging from political leadership. Americans, mining their own traditions and borrowing ideas, produced creative possibilities for overcoming the crises that threatened their country. In a work as dramatic and colorful as the era it covers, White narrates the conflicts and paradoxes of these decades of disorienting change and mounting unrest, out of which emerged a modern nation whose characteristics resonate with the present day.

Author : Troy Rondinone
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2009-11-12
Category : History
ISBN : 081354811X

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The Great Industrial War by Troy Rondinone Pdf

The Great Industrial War, a comprehensive assessment of how class has been interpreted by the media in American history, documents the rise and fall of a frightening concept: industrial war. Moving beyond the standard account of labor conflict as struggles between workers and management, Troy Rondinone asks why Americans viewed big strikes as "battles" in "irrepressible conflict" between the armies of capital and laborùa terrifying clash between workers, strikebreakers, police, and soldiers. Examining how the mainstream press along with the writings of a select group of influential reformers and politicians framed strike news, Rondinone argues that the Civil War, coming on the cusp of a revolution in industrial productivity, offered a gruesome, indelible model for national conflict. He follows the heated discourse on class war through the nineteenth century until its general dissipation in the mid-twentieth century. Incorporating labor history, cultural studies, linguistic anthropology, and sociology, The Great Industrial War explores the influence of historical experience on popular perceptions of social order and class conflict and provides a reinterpretation of the origins and meaning of the Taft-Hartley Act and the industrial relations regime it supported.

Author : Theresa A. Case
Publisher : Texas A&M University Press
Page : 293 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2010-02-23
Category : Transportation
ISBN : 9781603441704

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The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor by Theresa A. Case Pdf

Focusing on a story largely untold until now, Theresa A. Case studies the "Great Southwest Strike of 1886," which pitted entrepreneurial freedom against the freedom of employees to have a collective voice in their workplace. This series of local actions involved a historic labor agreement followed by the most massive sympathy strike the nation had ever seen. It attracted western railroaders across lines of race and skill, contributed to the rise and decline of the first mass industrial union in U.S. history (the Knights of Labor), and brought new levels of federal intervention in railway strikes. Case takes a fresh look at the labor unrest that shook Jay Gould's railroad empire in Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois. In Texas towns and cities like Marshall, Dallas, Fort Worth, Palestine, Texarkana, Denison, and Sherman, union recognition was the crucial issue of the day. Case also powerfully portrays the human facets of this strike, reconstructing the story of Martin Irons, a Scottish immigrant who came to adopt the union cause as his own. Irons committed himself wholly to the failed strike of 1886, continuing to urge violence even as courts handed down injunctions protecting the railroads, national union leaders publicly chastised him, the press demonized him, and former strikers began returning to work. Irons’s individual saga is set against the backdrop of social, political, and economic changes that transformed the region in the post–Civil War era. Students, scholars, and general readers interested in railroad, labor, social, or industrial history will not want to be without The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor.

Author : Steven L. Danver
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 1422 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2010-12-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9781598842227

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Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History [3 volumes] by Steven L. Danver Pdf

This three-volume work traces the history of revolts and rebellions from the colonial era to the 20th century. America has a long history of rebellions extending back before 1776. Revolts have taken place because of economic hard times, the denial of civil rights, racism, sexism, and classism. Studying the reasons for and results of these uprisings provides a window into the life of the American body politic—and what moves the American people to action. Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia details the history of popular actions from the colonial era to the 20th century. Each event in the three-volume encyclopedia is covered by an overview entry that details who was involved, why the revolt took place, what happened, and what the aftereffects were. Shorter subentries provide further detail on the important people, places, events, and ideas that were a part of the action. By presenting both the broad themes and the specifics, the encyclopedia enables readers to gain a general knowledge of the event or drill down to acquire a greater understanding.

Author : Jeremy Brecher
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 1977
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : WISC:89058505462

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Strike! by Jeremy Brecher Pdf

"An exciting history of American labor". -- The New York Times Book Review "New and Recommended" List

Author : Aaron Brenner,Benjamin Day,Immanuel Ness
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 793 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2015-01-28
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781317457077

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The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History by Aaron Brenner,Benjamin Day,Immanuel Ness Pdf

Strikes have been part of American labor relations from colonial days to the present, reflecting the widespread class conflict that has run throughout the nation's history. Against employers and their goons, against the police, the National Guard, local, state, and national officials, against racist vigilantes, against their union leaders, and against each other, American workers have walked off the job for higher wages, better benefits, bargaining rights, legislation, job control, and just plain dignity. At times, their actions have motivated groundbreaking legislation, defining new rights for all citizens; at other times they have led to loss of workers' lives. This comprehensive encyclopedia is the first detailed collection of historical research on strikes in America. To provide the analytical tools for understanding strikes, the volume includes two types of essays - those focused on an industry or economic sector, and those focused on a theme. Each industry essay introduces a group of workers and their employers and places them in their economic, political, and community contexts. The essay then describes the industry's various strikes, including the main issues involved and outcomes achieved, and assesses the impact of the strikes on the industry over time. Thematic essays address questions that can only be answered by looking at a variety of strikes across industries, groups of workers, and time, such as, why the number of strikes has declined since the 1970s, or why there was a strike wave in 1946. The contributors include historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, as well as current and past activists from unions and other social movement organizations. Photos, a Topic Finder, a bibliography, and name and subject indexes add to the works appeal.

Author : James W. Ely, Jr.
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2001-12-06
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780700611447

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Railroads and American Law by James W. Ely, Jr. Pdf

No enterprise is so seductive as a railroad for the influence it exerts, the power it gives, and the hope of gain it offers.—Poor's Manual of Railroads (1900) At its peak, the railroad was the Internet of its day in its transformative impact on American life and law. A harbinger and promoter of economic empire, it was also the icon of a technological revolution that accelerated national expansion and in the process transformed our legal system. James W. Ely Jr., in the first comprehensive legal history of the rail industry, shows that the two institutions-the railroad and American law-had a profound influence on each other. Ely chronicles how "America's first big business" impelled the creation of a vast array of new laws in a country where long-distance internal transport had previously been limited to canals and turnpikes. Railroads, the first major industry to experience extensive regulation, brought about significant legal innovations governing interstate commerce, eminent domain, private property, labor relations, and much more. Much of this development was originally designed to serve the interests of the railroads themselves but gradually came to contest and control the industry's power and exploitative tendencies. As Ely reveals, despite its great promise and potential as an engine of prosperity and uniter of far-flung regions, the railroad was not universally admired. Railroads uprooted people, threatened local autonomy, and posed dangers to employees and the public alike-situations with unprecedented legal ramifications. Ely explores the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which those ramifications played out, as railroads crossed state lines and knitted together a diverse nation with thousands of miles of iron rail. Epic in its scope, Railroads and American Law makes a complex subject accessible to a wide range of readers, from legal historians to railroad buffs, and shows the many ways in which a powerful industry brought change and innovation to America.

Author : Eric Arnesen
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 1734 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780415968263

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Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-class History by Eric Arnesen Pdf

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Author : Joanna L. Dyl
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2017-10-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9780295742472

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Seismic City by Joanna L. Dyl Pdf

On April 18, 1906, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook the San Francisco region, igniting fires that burned half the city. The disaster in all its elements — earthquake, fires, and recovery — profoundly disrupted the urban order and challenged San Francisco’s perceived permanence. The crisis temporarily broke down spatial divisions of class and race and highlighted the contested terrain of urban nature in an era of widespread class conflict, simmering ethnic tensions, and controversial reform efforts. From a proposal to expel Chinatown from the city center to a vision of San Francisco paved with concrete in the name of sanitation, the process of reconstruction involved reenvisioning the places of both people and nature. In their zeal to restore their city, San Franciscans downplayed the role of the earthquake and persisted in choosing patterns of development that exacerbated risk. In this close study of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Joanna L. Dyl examines the decades leading up to the catastrophic event and the city’s recovery from it. Combining urban environmental history and disaster studies, Seismic City demonstrates how the crisis and subsequent rebuilding reflect the dynamic interplay of natural and human influences that have shaped San Francisco.