This work provides a history of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. Topics covered include: the union's influence on political legislation and global economy; the story of the East European immigrants at the turn of the 20th century; and the union's spirit of social reform.

New edition of the 1993 book that detailed the horrendous tactics employers and union busters will use to stop workers from forming unions. Paperback version.

With the election of Donald Trump, economic nationalism has re-emerged as a patriotic rallying cry. But are imports and “foreigners” really to blame for the disappearance of good jobs in the United States? Tracing the history and politics of economic nationalism from the American Revolution to the present, historian Dana Frank investigates the long history of “Buy American” campaigns and their complexities. This entertaining story is full of surprises, including misguided heroes, chilling racism, and more than a few charlatans. Frank helps reframe the debate between free trade, on the one hand, and nationalism on the other, to suggest alternative strategies that would serve the needs of working Americans—instead of the interests of corporations and economic elites—and that don’t cast “foreigners” or immigrants as our “enemies.”

Newly arrived in New York in 1882 from Tsarist Russia, the sixteen-year-old Bernard Weinstein discovered an America in which unionism, socialism, and anarchism were very much in the air. He found a home in the tenements of New York and for the next fifty years he devoted his life to the struggles of fellow Jewish workers. The Jewish Unions in America blends memoir and history to chronicle this time. It describes how Weinstein led countless strikes, held the unions together in the face of retaliation from the bosses, investigated sweatshops and factories with the aid of reformers, and faced down schisms by various factions, including Anarchists and Communists. He co-founded the United Hebrew Trades and wrote speeches, articles and books advancing the cause of the labor movement. From the pages of this book emerges a vivid picture of workers’ organizations at the beginning of the twentieth century and a capitalist system that bred exploitation, poverty, and inequality. Although workers’ rights have made great progress in the decades since, Weinstein’s descriptions of workers with jobs pitted against those without, and American workers against workers abroad, still carry echoes today. The Jewish Unions in America is a testament to the struggles of working people a hundred years ago. But it is also a reminder that workers must still battle to live decent lives in the free market. For the first time, Maurice Wolfthal’s readable translation makes Weinstein’s Yiddish text available to English readers. It is essential reading for students and scholars of labor history, Jewish history, and the history of American immigration.

Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union: The European Heritage Label provides an interdisciplinary examination of the ways in which European cultural heritage is created, communicated, and governed via the new European Heritage Label scheme. Drawing on ethnographic field research conducted across ten countries at sites that have been awarded with the European Heritage Label, the authors of the book approach heritage as an entangled social, spatial, temporal, discursive, narrative, performative, and embodied process. Recognising that heritage is inherently political and used by diverse actors as a tool for re-imagining communities, identities, and borders, and for generating notions of inclusion and exclusion in Europe, the book also considers the idea of Europe itself as a narrative. Chapters tackle issues such as multilevel governance of heritage; geopolitics of border-crossings and border-making; participation and non-participation; and embodiment and affective experience of heritage. Creating and Governing Cultural Heritage in the European Union advances heritage studies with an interdisciplinary approach that utilises and combines theories and conceptualizations from critical geopolitics, political studies, EU and European studies, cultural policy research, and cultural studies. As such, the volume will be of interest to scholars and students engaged in the study of heritage, politics, belonging, the EU, ideas, and narratives of Europe.

Apparel manufacturing in the American South, by virtue of its size, its reliance upon female labor, and its broad geographic scope, is an important but often overlooked industry that connects the disparate concerns of women's history, southern cultural history, and labor history. In Striking Beauties, Michelle Haberland examines its essential features and the varied experiences of its workers during the industry's great expansion from the late 1930s through the demise of its southern branch at the end of the twentieth century. The popular conception of the early twentieth-century South as largely agrarian informs many histories of industry and labor in the United States. But as Haberland demonstrates, the apparel industry became a key part of the southern economy after the Great Depression and a major driver of southern industrialization. The gender and racial composition of the workforce, the growth of trade unions, technology, and capital investment were all powerful forces in apparel's migration south. Yet those same forces also revealed the tensions caused by racial and gender inequities not only in the region but in the nation at large. Striking Beauties places the struggles of working women for racial and economic justice in the larger context of southern history. The role of women as the primary consumers of the family placed them in a critical position to influence the success or failure of boycotts, union label programs and ultimately solidarity.