"Pre-eminent among historians of labor history." --Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
The textbook history of the 1920s is a story of Prohibition, flappers, and unbounded prosperity. For millions of industrial workers, however, the "roaring twenties" looked very different. Working-class communities were already in crisis in the years before the stock market crash of 1929. Strikes in the 1920s and attempts to organize the unemployed and fight evictions in the early 1930s often fell victim to police violence and repression.
Here, Irving Bernstein recaptures the social history of the decade leading up to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration, uncovers its widespread inequality, and sheds light on the long-forgotten struggles that form the prelude to the great labor victories of the 1930s.
"In other words, viewed from afar, most of the people who were suffering the hardships of the Depression were depressed and even ashamed, ready to blame themselves for their plight. But the train of developments that connects changes in social conditions to a changed consciousness is not simple. People, including ordinary people, harbor somewhere in their memories the building blocks of different and contradictory interpretations of what it is that is happening to them, of who should be blamed, and what can be done about it. Even the hangdog and ashamed unemployed worker who swings his lunch box and strides down the street so the neighbors will think he is going to a job can also have other ideas that only have to be evoked, and when they are make it possible for him on another day to rally with others and rise up in anger at his condition.
--From the new introduction by Frances Fox Piven

A groundbreaking moment in the discourse of the labour movement and a classic text which revolutionised social history. Bernstein uncovers a period when industrial trade unionism, working-class power and socialism became a rallying cry for millions of workers; from fields, mills, mines and factories. This is the second instalment of Bernstein's critically acclaimed trilogy on the American labour movement which charts how the New Deal and labour unions preserved democracy and capitalism at a time when the survival of both was unclear.

A pioneer in women's studies and long-term activist for women's issues, Gerda Lerner is one of the founders and foremost scholars of women's history. In her latest work, Lerner combines personal reminiscences with innovative theory that illuminate the importance of history and the vital role women have played in it.

The book's topics range from pieces on the author's early life as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and on her slow assimilation into American life, to an insightful essay on non-violent resistance from the Quakers to the civil rights movement of the 1950s. Lerner also offers a bold and innovative look at the issues of race and class as they relate to women.

Foreword By Benjamin Aaron And Arthur M. Ross.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.