"Vividly capturing a moment in history when American and British unions seemed about to join with their Soviet counterparts to create a world unified by its workers, this wide-ranging study uncovers the social, cultural, and ideological currents that generated worldwide support among workers for a union international as well as the pull of national interests that ultimately subverted it. In a striking departure from the conventional wisdom, Victor Silverman argues that the ideology of the cold war was essentially imposed from above and came into conflict with the attitudes workers developed about internationalism. This work, the first to look at internationalism from the point of view of the worker, confirms at the level of social and cultural history that the postwar tensions between the Anglo-Americans and the Soviets took several years to become a new orthodoxy. Silverman demonstrates that for millions of trade unionists in dozens of countries the Cold War began in late 1948, rather than between 1945 and 1946, as generally recorded by diplomatic historians. Tracing the faultlines between politics and ideals and between national and class allegiances, Silverman shows how the vision of an international working-class recovery was ultimately discredited and the cold war set inexorably in motion."

Vividly capturing a moment in history when American and British unions seemed about to join with their Soviet counterparts to create a world unified by its workers, this wide-ranging study uncovers the social, cultural, and ideological currents that generated worldwide support among workers for a union international as well as the pull of national interests that ultimately subverted it. In a striking departure from the conventional wisdom, Victor Silverman argues that the ideology of the cold war was essentially imposed from above and came into conflict with the attitudes workers developed about internationalism. This work, the first to look at internationalism from the point of view of the worker, confirms at the level of social and cultural history that the postwar tensions between the Anglo-Americans and the Soviets took several years to become a new orthodoxy. Silverman demonstrates that for millions of trade unionists in dozens of countries the Cold War began in late 1948, rather than between 1945 and 1946, as generally recorded by diplomatic historians. Tracing the faultlines between politics and ideals and between national and class allegiances, Silverman shows how the vision of an international working-class recovery was ultimately discredited and the cold war set inexorably in motion.

Realities of the street-level American Communist experience during the worst years of the Depression

A century ago, governments buoyed by Progressive Era–beliefs began to assume greater responsibility for protecting and rescuing citizens. Yet the aftermath of two disasters in the United States–Canada borderlands--the Salem Fire of 1914 and the Halifax Explosion of 1917--saw working class survivors instead turn to friends, neighbors, coworkers, and family members for succor and aid. Both official and unofficial responses, meanwhile, showed how the United States and Canada were linked by experts, workers, and money. In Disaster Citizenship, Jacob A. C. Remes draws on histories of the Salem and Halifax events to explore the institutions--both formal and informal--that ordinary people relied upon in times of crisis. He explores patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity and details how people adapted these traditions when necessary. Yet, as he shows, these methods--though often quick and effective--remained illegible to reformers. Indeed, soldiers, social workers, and reformers wielding extraordinary emergency powers challenged these grassroots practices to impose progressive "solutions" on what they wrongly imagined to be a fractured social landscape.

The challenges and successes of unionization at four U.S. airlines, with a focus on baggage handlers

Victor Arnautoff reigned as San Francisco's leading mural painter during the New Deal era. Yet that was only part of an astonishing life journey from Tsarist officer to leftist painter. Robert W. Cherny's masterful biography of Arnautoff braids the artist's work with his increasingly leftist politics and the tenor of his times. Delving into sources on Russian émigrés and San Francisco's arts communities, Cherny traces Arnautoff's life from refugee art student and assistant to Diego Rivera to prominence in the New Deal's art projects and a faculty position at Stanford University. As Arnautoff's politics moved left, he often incorporated working people and people of color into his treatment of the American past and present. In the 1950s, however, his participation in leftist organizations and a highly critical cartoon of Richard Nixon landed him before the House Un-American Activities Committee and led to calls for his dismissal from Stanford. Arnautoff eventually departed America, a refugee of another kind, now fleeing personal loss and the disintegration of the left-labor culture that had nurtured him, before resuming his artistic career in the Soviet Union that he had fought in his youth to destroy.

Workplaces in the United States are safer today than they were a hundred and twenty years ago. In this book, Donald W. Rogers attributes this improvement partly to the development in the Progressive Era of surprisingly strong state-level work safety and health regulatory agencies, a patchwork of commissions and labor departments that advanced safety law from common-law negligence to the modern system of administrative regulation. Rogers examines the Wisconsin Industrial Commission and compares it to arrangements in Ohio, California, New York, Illinois, and Alabama. Connecting this history to the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970, Making Capitalism Safe will revise historical understandings of state regulation, compensation insurance, and labor law politics--issues that remain pressing in our time.