Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes is both a celebration and commemoration of working class culture. It contains sometimes inspiring accounts of working class communities and people telling their own stories, and weaves together examples of tangible and intangible heritage, place, history, memory, music and literature.

Rather than being framed in a 'social inclusion' framework, which sees working class culture as a deficit, this book addresses the question "What is labour and working class heritage, how does it differ or stand in opposition to dominant ways of understanding heritage and history, and in what ways is it used as a contemporary resource?" It also explores how heritage is used in working class communities and by labour organizations, and considers what meanings and significance this heritage may have, while also identifying how and why communities and their heritage have been excluded. Drawing on new scholarship in heritage studies, social memory, the public history of labour, and new working class studies, this volume highlights the heritage of working people, communities and organizations. Contributions are drawn from a number of Western countries including the USA, UK, Spain, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand, and from a range of disciplines including heritage and museum studies, history, sociology, politics, archaeology and anthropology.

Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes represents an innovative and useful resource for heritage and museum practitioners, students and academics concerned with understanding community heritage and the debate on social inclusion/exclusion. It offers new ways of understanding heritage, its values and consequences, and presents a challenge to dominant and traditional frameworks for understanding and identifying heritage and heritage making.

Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes is both a celebration and commemoration of working class culture. It contains sometimes inspiring accounts of working class communities and people telling their own stories, and weaves together examples of tangible and intangible heritage, place, history, memory, music and literature.

Rather than being framed in a 'social inclusion' framework, which sees working class culture as a deficit, this book addresses the question "What is labour and working class heritage, how does it differ or stand in opposition to dominant ways of understanding heritage and history, and in what ways is it used as a contemporary resource?" It also explores how heritage is used in working class communities and by labour organizations, and considers what meanings and significance this heritage may have, while also identifying how and why communities and their heritage have been excluded. Drawing on new scholarship in heritage studies, social memory, the public history of labour, and new working class studies, this volume highlights the heritage of working people, communities and organizations. Contributions are drawn from a number of Western countries including the USA, UK, Spain, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand, and from a range of disciplines including heritage and museum studies, history, sociology, politics, archaeology and anthropology.

Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes represents an innovative and useful resource for heritage and museum practitioners, students and academics concerned with understanding community heritage and the debate on social inclusion/exclusion. It offers new ways of understanding heritage, its values and consequences, and presents a challenge to dominant and traditional frameworks for understanding and identifying heritage and heritage making.

The racialization of immigrant labor and the labor strife in the coal and textile communities in northeastern Pennsylvania appears to be an isolated incident in history. Rather this history can serve as a touchstone, connecting the history of the exploited laborers to today's labor in the global economy. By drawing parallels between the past and present - for example, the coal mines of the nineteenth-century northeastern Pennsylvania and the sweatshops of the twenty-first century in Bangladesh - we can have difficult conversations about the past and advance our commitment to address social justice issues.

This unique study looks at the role material goods played in shaping our culture. Using archaeological data, probate inventories, and etiquette books, Paul A. Shackel has collected valuable information on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century material items which, when analyzed in historical context, reveals how these items have shaped the development of western culture. Specific examples from the Chesapeake area of Maryland show how individuals and groups responded to social and economic crises by using material goods to define power relations, create social hierarchies, and preserve the social order. Shackel argues that, during the pre-industrial era, society's elite introduced hard-to-find material items, like the fork, with rules of etiquette to maintain social distance and stratification. As the Industrial Revolution made material items cheaper and easier to obtain, the non-elite began to adopt regular usage of particular items as part of standardized behavior while the elite sought to maintain their status with newer and different material goods. Focusing on how the spread of capitalism affected various social groups, Shackel pays specific attention to culture and consumption and symbolic qualities of material culture. His analysis incorporates a review of etiquette literature from the late medieval era to provide a global context for regional behavior and material culture.

"Provides a fascinating and nuanced study of the transformations in religious and social ideals among Moravians as they worked to implement their aspirations in the harsh realities of a North Carolina landscape shaped by racism. Ferguson reveals the intersecting dynamics of religious aspirations, sectarian prejudices, conflicting designs across cultural landscapes, paradoxical divergences of religious ideals and social realities, and the life stories of African Americans working to navigate such contested terrain."--Christopher C. Fennell, author of "Crossroads and Cosmologies" "A fascinating examination of the tension of race relations in the antebellum South. "God's Fields" unfolds like a murder mystery and is hard to put down."--Christopher E. Hendricks, author of "The Backcountry Towns of Colonial Virginia" The Moravian community of Salem, North Carolina, was founded in 1766, and the town--the hub of nearly 100,000 piedmont acres purchased thirteen years before and named "Wachovia"--quickly became the focal point for the church's colonial presence in the South. While the brethren preached the unity of all humans under God, a careful analysis of the birth and growth of their Salem settlement reveals that the group gradually embraced the institutions of slavery and racial segregation in opposition to their religious beliefs. Although Salem's still-active community includes one of the oldest African American congregations in the nation, the evidence contained in "God's Fields" reveals that during much of the twentieth century, the church's segregationist past was intentionally concealed. Leland Ferguson's work reconstructing this "secret history" through years of archaeological fieldwork was part of a historical preservation program that helped convince the Moravian Church in North America to formally apologize in 2006 for its participation in slavery and clear a way for racial reconciliation. Leland Ferguson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of anthropology at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of "Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Colonial African America, 1650-1800," a recipient of the Southern Anthropological Society's James Mooney Award.