In 1949 and 1950, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled many left-wing unions, representing 750,000 workers, because they were supposedly Communist-dominated. This collection of previously unpublished essays explores the history of those eleven left-led unions. Some essays consider specific aspects of several unions--the Longshoremen, the United Electricians (UE), the Fur Workers, and the Food and Tobacco Workers--while others take up the impact of the federal government's and the Catholic church's anticommunism upon the unions as a whole. This collection also addresses central domestic issues of twentieth-century America: race and government policy in the shaping of trade unionism; the impact of anticommunism and the cold war on race relations and working conditions; and the short- and long-range impact of the expulsions upon the labor movement. With groundbreaking essays that also concern the post-World War II period, Southern workers and workers in non-basic industries, this book will appeal to students of radicalism, race relations, anticommunism, and labor history.

"IT'S TIME! They have my cattle and now they have one of my boys. Range War begins tomorrow at Bundy Ranch." These words, pounded out on a laptop at Cliven Bundy's besieged Nevada ranch on April 6, 2014, ignited a new American revolution. Across the country, a certain type of citizen snapped to attention: This was the flashpoint they'd been waiting for, a chance to help a fellow American stand up to a tyrannical and corrupt federal government. Up in Arms chronicles how an isolated clan of desert-dwelling Mormons became the guiding light—and then the outright leaders—of America's Patriot movement. The nation was riveted in 2014 when hundreds of Bundy supporters, many of them armed, forced federal agents to abandon a court-ordered cattle roundup. Then in 2016, Ammon Bundy, one of Cliven's 13 children, led a 41-day armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Those events and the subsequent shootings, arrests, and trials captured headlines, but they're just part of a story that has never been fully told. John Temple, award-winning journalist and author of American Pain, gives readers an unprecedented and objective look at the real people and families at the heart of these highly publicized standoffs. Up in Arms offers a propulsive narrative populated by rifle-toting cowboys, apocalyptic militiamen, undercover infiltrators, and the devout and charismatic Bundys themselves. Neither mainstream nor conservative media outlets have contextualized the religious, political, environmental, and economic factors that set the stage for these events. Up in Arms provides a framework for understanding this diverse collection of American rebels who believe government overreach justifies the taking up of arms.

In 1678, the Puritan minister Samuel Nowell preached a sermon he called "Abraham in Arms," in which he urged his listeners to remember that "Hence it is no wayes unbecoming a Christian to learn to be a Souldier." The title of Nowell's sermon was well chosen. Abraham of the Old Testament resonated deeply with New England men, as he embodied the ideal of the householder-patriarch, at once obedient to God and the unquestioned leader of his family and his people in war and peace. Yet enemies challenged Abraham's authority in New England: Indians threatened the safety of his household, subordinates in his own family threatened his status, and wives and daughters taken into captivity became baptized Catholics, married French or Indian men, and refused to return to New England. In a bold reinterpretation of the years between 1620 and 1763, Ann M. Little reveals how ideas about gender and family life were central to the ways people in colonial New England, and their neighbors in New France and Indian Country, described their experiences in cross-cultural warfare. Little argues that English, French, and Indian people had broadly similar ideas about gender and authority. Because they understood both warfare and political power to be intertwined expressions of manhood, colonial warfare may be understood as a contest of different styles of masculinity. For New England men, what had once been a masculinity based on household headship, Christian piety, and the duty to protect family and faith became one built around the more abstract notions of British nationalism, anti-Catholicism, and soldiering for the Empire. Based on archival research in both French and English sources, court records, captivity narratives, and the private correspondence of ministers and war officials, Abraham in Arms reconstructs colonial New England as a frontier borderland in which religious, cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries were permeable, fragile, and contested by Europeans and Indians alike.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized the individual right to keep and bear arms, but courts in states that have extreme gun control restrictions apply tests that balance the right away. This book demonstrates that the right peaceably to carry firearms is a fundamental right recognized by the text of the Second Amendment and is part of our American history and tradition. Halbrook’s scholarly work is an exhaustive historical treatment of the fundamental, individual right to carry firearms outside of the home. Halbrook traces this right from its origins in England through American colonial times, the American Revolution, the Constitution’s ratification debates, and then through the antebellum and post-bellum periods, including the history surrounding the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This book is another important contribution by Halbrook to the scholarship concerning the text, history and tradition of the Second Amendment’s right to bear and carry arms.