BiblioVault - Books about Social classes

Tales of Two Cities: Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and South America
By Camilla Townsend
University of Texas Press, 2000
Library of Congress HN320.Z9S67 2000 | Dewey Decimal 305.5097526

With a common heritage as former colonies of Europe, why did the United States so outstrip Latin America in terms of economic development in the nineteenth century? In this innovative study, Camilla Townsend challenges the traditional view that North Americans succeeded because of better attitudes toward work—the Protestant work ethic—and argues instead that they prospered because of differences in attitudes towards workers that evolved in the colonial era.

Townsend builds her study around workers' lives in two very similar port cities in the 1820s and 1830s. Through the eyes of the young Frederick Douglass in Baltimore, Maryland, and an Indian woman named Ana Yagual in Guayaquil, Ecuador, she shows how differing attitudes towards race and class in North and South America affected local ways of doing business. This empirical research significantly clarifies the relationship between economic culture and racial identity and its long-term effects.

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The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig
Elizabeth L. Wollman
University of Michigan Press, 2006
Library of Congress ML1711.8.N3W65 2006 | Dewey Decimal 782.1416609

The tumultuous decade of the 1960s in America gave birth to many new ideas and forms of expression, among them the rock musical. An unlikely offspring of the performing arts, the rock musical appeared when two highly distinctive and American art forms joined onstage in New York City. The Theater Will Rock explores the history of the rock musical, which has since evolved to become one of the most important cultural influences on American musical theater and a major cultural export. Packed with candid commentary by members of New York's vibrant theater community, The Theater Will Rock traces the rock musical's evolution over nearly fifty years, in popular productions such as Hair, The Who's Tommy, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Little Shop of Horrors, Rent, and Mamma Mia!---and in notable flops such as The Capeman.

"A much-needed study of the impact of rock music on the musical theater and its resulting challenges, complexities, failures, and successes. Anyone interested in Broadway will learn a great deal from this book."
---William Everett, author of The Musical: A Research Guide to Musical Theatre

"This well-written account puts the highs and lows of producing staged rock musicals in New York City into perspective and is well worth reading for the depth of insight it provides."
---Studies in Musical Theatre

Elizabeth L. Wollman is Assistant Professor of Music at Baruch College, City University of New York.

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Those of Little Note: Gender, Race, and Class in Historical Archaeology
Elizabeth M. Scott
University of Arizona Press, 1994
Library of Congress CC79.H5T48 1994 | Dewey Decimal 070.01

Because some classes of people may not have been considered worthy of notice by dominant social groups in the past, they may be less visible to us today in historical and archaeological records; consequently, they remain less studied. This volume attempts to redress this oversight by presenting case studies of historical and archaeological research on various ethnic, racial, gender, and socioeconomic groups in colonial and post-colonial North America. These contributions illustrate how historical archaeologists and ethnohistorians have used documentary and archaeological evidence to retrieve information on neglected aspects of American history. They explore ways of making more visible Native Americans, African Americans, and Euro-Americans of differing ethnic groups and economic classes, and also shed new light on such groups as celibate religious communities, women in predominantly male communities, and working-class and middle-class women in urban communities. Material evidence on "those of little note" provides not only fresh insight into our understanding of daily life in the past, but also a refreshing counterpoint to the male- and Euro-centered analysis that has characterized much of historical archaeology since its inception. Readers will find many chapters rewarding in their application of sophisticated feminist theory to archaeological data, or in their probing of complex relational issues concerning the construction of gender identity and gender relationships. As the first archeaeologically-focused collection to examine the interconnectedness of gender, class, race, and ethnicity in past societies, Those of Little Note sets new standards for future research. CONTENTS
I--Introduction
1. Through the Lens of Gender: Archaeology, Inequality, and Those "Of Little Note" / Elizabeth M. Scott
II--Native American and African American Communities
2. Cloth, Clothing, and Related Paraphernalia: A Key to Gender Visibility in the Archaeological Record of Russian America / Louise M. Jackson
3. "We Took Care of Each Other Like Families Were Meant To": Gender, Social Organization, and Wage Labor Among the Apache at Roosevelt / Everett Bassett
4. The House of the Black Burghardts: An Investigation of Race, Gender, and Class at the W. E. B. DuBois Boyhood Homesite / Nancy Ladd Muller
III--All Male and Predominantly Male Communities
5. "With Manly Courage": Reading the Construction of Gender in a 19th-Century Religious Community / Elizabeth Kryder-Reid
6. The Identification of Gender at Northern Military Sites of the Late 18th Century / David R. Starbuck
7. Class, Gender Strategies, and Material Culture in the Mining West / Donald L. Hardesty
IV--Working Women in Urban Communities
8. Mrs. Starr's Profession / Donna J. Seifert
9. Diversity and 19th-Century Domestic Reform: Relationships Among Classes and Ethnic Groups / Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood

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Tibes: People, Power, and Ritual at the Center of the Cosmos
Edited by L. Antonio Curet and Lisa M. Stringer
University of Alabama Press, 2009
Library of Congress F1969.T53 2010 | Dewey Decimal 972.957

The first comprehensive analysis of a strategically located ceremonial center on the island of Puerto Rico

The prehistoric civic-ceremonial center of Tibes is located on the southern coast of Puerto Rico, just north of the modern coastal city of Ponce. Protected on two sides by a river, and on the other two sides by hills, this approximately 10.5-acre site remains as fertile and productive today as when first occupied over 2,000 years ago. Such a rich region would have been a choice location for native peoples because of the diversity in all resources, from land, air, and sea--and also symbolically crucial as a liminal space within the landscape. It may have been regarded as a space charged with numen or cosmic energy where different parts of the cosmos (natural vs. supernatural, or world of the living vs. world of the dead) overlap. Archaeological evidence reveals a long occupation, about 1,000 years, possibly followed by an extensive period of sporadic ceremonial use after the site itself was practically abandoned.

In this volume, nineteen Caribbeanists, across a wide academic spectrum, examine the geophysical, paleoethnobotanical, faunal, lithics, base rock, osteology, bone chemistry and nutrition, social landscape, and ceremonial constructs employed at Tibes. These scholars provide a concise, well-presented, comprehensive analysis of the evidence for local level changes in household economy, internal organization, accessibility to economic, religious, and symbolic resources related to the development and internal operation of socially stratified societies in the Caribbean.

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To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain
Christopher Hilliard
Harvard University Press, 2006
Library of Congress PR478.S57H55 2006 | Dewey Decimal 820.90091

In twentieth-century Britain the literary landscape underwent a fundamental change. Aspiring authors--traditionally drawn from privileged social backgrounds--now included factory workers writing amid chaotic home lives, and married women joining writers' clubs in search of creative outlets. In this brilliantly conceived book, Christopher Hilliard reveals the extraordinary history of "ordinary" voices.

Writing as an organized pursuit emerged in the 1920s, complete with clubs, magazines, guidebooks, and correspondence schools. The magazine The Writer helped coordinate a network of "writers' circles" throughout Britain that offered prospective authors--especially women--outside the educated London elite a forum in which to discuss writing. The legacy of Wordsworth and other English Romantics encouraged the belief that would-be authors should write about what they knew personally--that art flowed from genuine experience and technique was of secondary importance. The 1930s saw a boom in the publication of so-called proletarian writing, working-class men writing "in my own language about my own people," as Birmingham writer Leslie Halward put it. During World War II, soldiers turned to poetry to cope with the trauma of war, and the popular magazine Seven promoted the idea that anyone, regardless of social background, could be a creative writer. Self-expression became a democratic right.

In capturing the creative lives of ordinary people--would-be fiction-writers and poets who until now have left scarcely a mark on written history--Hilliard sensitively reconstructs the literary culture of a democratic age.

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To Live and Die in America: Class, Power, Health and Healthcare
Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson
Pluto Press, 2013
Library of Congress RA395.A3C48 2013 | Dewey Decimal 362.10973

To Live and Die in America details how the United States has among the worst indicators of health in the industrialised world and at the same time spends significantly more on its health care system than any other industrial nation.

Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson explain this contradictory phenomenon as the product of the unique brand of capitalism that has developed in the US. It is this particular form of capitalism that created both the social and economic conditions that largely influence health outcomes and the inefficient, unpopular and inaccessible health care system that is incapable of dealing with them.

The authors argue that improving health in America requires a change in the conditions in which people live and work as well as a restructured health care system.

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Transcribing Class and Gender: Masculinity and Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Courts and Offices
Carole Srole
University of Michigan Press, 2012
Library of Congress HD6073.S582U67 2010 | Dewey Decimal 305.389623097309

"Drawing upon census data, trade periodicals devoted to stenography and court reporting, the writings of educational reformers, and fiction, Srole allows us to better understand the roles that gender and work played in the formation of middle-class identity. Clearly written and thoroughly researched, her book reminds us of the contradictions that both men and women faced as they navigated changes in the labor market and sought to realize a modern professional identity."
---Thomas Augst, New York University

Transcribing Class and Gender explores the changing meanings of clerical work in nineteenth-century America, focusing on the discourse surrounding that work. At a time when shorthand transcription was the primary method of documenting business and legal communications and transactions, most stenographers were men, but changing technology saw the emergence of women in the once male-dominated field. Carole Srole argues that this shift placed stenographers in a unique position to construct a new image of the professional man and woman and, in doing so, to redefine middle- and working-class identities.

Many male court reporters emphasized their professionalism, portraying themselves as educated language experts as a way to elevate themselves above the growing numbers of female and working-class stenographers and typewriter operators. Meanwhile, women in the courts and offices were confronting the derogatory image of the so-called Typewriter Girl who cared more about her looks, clothing, and marriage prospects than her job. Like males in the field, women responded by fashioning a gendered professional image---one that served to combat this new version of degraded female labor while also maintaining traditional ideals of femininity.

The study is unique in the way it reads and analyzes popular fiction, stenography trade magazines, the archives of professional associations, and writings by educational reformers to provide new perspectives on this history. The author challenges the common assumption that men and women clerks had separate work cultures and demonstrates how each had to balance elements of manhood and womanhood in the drive toward professionalism and the construction of a new middle-class image. Transcribing Class and Gender joins the recent scholarship that employs cultural studies approaches to class and gender without abandoning the social history valuation of workers' experiences.

Carole Srole is Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles.

Photo: A female stenographer working for an actuary in 1897. Courtesy Metlife Archives.

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Transformative Planning: Radical Alternatives to Neoliberal Urbanism
Edited by Thomas Angotti
Black Rose Books, 2019
Library of Congress HT166.T74 2020 | Dewey Decimal 307.1216

Though modern urban planning is only a century old, it appears to be facing extinction. Historically, urban planning has been narrowly conceived, ignoring gaping inequalities of race, class, and gender while promoting unbridled growth and environmental injustices. In Transformative Planning, Tom Angotti argues that unless planning is radically transformed and develops serious alternatives to neoliberal urbanism and disaster capitalism it will be irrelevant in this century. This book emerges from decades of urban planners and activists contesting inequalities of class, race, and gender in cities around the world. It compiles the discussions and debates that appeared in the publications of Planners Network, a North American urban planners’ association. Original contributions have been added to the collection so that it serves as both a reflection of past theory and practice and a challenge for a new generation of activists and planners.

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Twenty Years of Life: Why the Poor Die Earlier and How to Challenge Inequity
Suzanne Bohan
Island Press, 2018
Library of Congress HC79.P6B582 2018 | Dewey Decimal 362.57

In Twenty Years of Life, Suzanne Bohan exposes the disturbing flip side of the American dream: your health is largely determined by your zip code. The strain of living in a poor neighborhood, with sub-par schools, lack of parks, fear of violence, few to no healthy food options, and the stress of unpaid bills is literally taking years off people’s lives. The difference in life expectancy between wealthy and distressed neighborhoods can be as much as twenty years.

Bohan chronicles a bold experiment to challenge this inequity. The California Endowment, one of the nation’s largest health foundations, is upending the old-school, top-down charity model and investing $1 billion over ten years to help distressed communities advocate for their own interests. This new approach to community change draws on the latent political power of residents and is driving reform both locally and in the state’s legislative chambers. If it can work in fourteen of California’s most challenging and diverse communities, it has the potential to work anywhere in the country.

Bohan introduces us to former street shooters with official government jobs; kids who convinced their city council members to build skate parks; students and parents who demanded fairer school discipline policies to keep kids in the classroom; urban farmers who pushed for permits to produce and sell their food; and a Native American tribe that revived its traditional forest management practices. Told with compassion and insight, their stories will fundamentally change how we think about the root causes of disease and the prospects for healing.

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