A People’s History of Classics explores the influence of the classical past on the lives of working-class people, whose voices have been almost completely excluded from previous histories of ...classical scholarship and pedagogy, in Britain and Ireland from the late 17th to the early 20thcentury. This volume challenges the prevailing scholarly and public assumption that the intimate link between the exclusive intellectual culture of British elites and the study of the ancient Greeks and Romans and their languages meant that working-class culture was a ‘Classics-Free Zone’. Making use of diverse sources of information, both published and unpublished, in archives, museums and libraries across the United Kingdom and Ireland, Hall and Stead examine the working-class experience of classical culture from the Bill of Rights in 1689 to the outbreak of World War II. They analyse a huge volume of data, from individuals, groups, regions and activities, in a huge range of sources including memoirs, autobiographies, Trade Union collections, poetry, factory archives, artefacts and documents in regional museums. This allows a deeper understanding not only of the many examples of interaction with the Classics, but also what these cultural interactions signified to the working poor: from the promise of social advancement, to propaganda exploited by the elites, to covert and overt class war. A People’s History of Classics offers a fascinating and insightful exploration of the many and varied engagements with Greece and Rome among the working classes in Britain and Ireland, and is a must-read not only for classicists, but also for students of British and Irish social, intellectual and political history in this period. Further, it brings new historical depth and perspectives to public debates around the future of classical education, and should be read by anyone with an interest in educational policy in Britain today.
As Karyn R. Lacy's innovative work in the suburbs of Washington, DC, reveals, there is a continuum of middle-classness among blacks, ranging from lower-middle class to middle-middle class to ...upper-middle class. Focusing on the latter two, Lacy explores an increasingly important social and demographic group: middle-class blacks who live in middle-class suburbs where poor blacks are not present. These "blue-chip black" suburbanites earn well over fifty thousand dollars annually and work in predominantly white professional environments. Lacy examines the complicated sense of identity that individuals in these groups craft to manage their interactions with lower-class blacks, middle-class whites, and other middle-class blacks as they seek to reap the benefits of their middle-class status.
This provocative study of the Latino political experience offers a nuanced, in-depth, and often surprising perspective on the factors affecting the political engagement of a segment of the population ...that is now the nation's largest minority. Drawing from one hundred in-depth interviews, Lisa García Bedolla compares the political attitudes and behavior of Latinos in two communities: working-class East Los Angeles and middle-class Montebello. Asking how collective identity and social context have affected political socialization, political attitudes and practices, and levels of political participation among the foreign born and native born, she offers new findings that are often at odds with the conventional wisdom emphasizing the role socioeconomic status plays in political involvement.
This study opens a critical perspective on the slow death of socialism and the rebirth of capitalism in the world's most dynamic and populous country. Based on remarkable fieldwork and extensive ...interviews in Chinese textile, apparel, machinery, and household appliance factories,Against the Lawfinds a rising tide of labor unrest mostly hidden from the world's attention. Providing a broad political and economic analysis of this labor struggle together with fine-grained ethnographic detail, the book portrays the Chinese working class as workers' stories unfold in bankrupt state factories and global sweatshops, in crowded dormitories and remote villages, at street protests as well as in quiet disenchantment with the corrupt officialdom and the fledgling legal system.
Class Unknown Pittenger, Mark
08/2012, Volume:
4
eBook
Since the Gilded Age, social scientists, middle-class reformers, and writers have left the comforts of their offices to "pass" as steel workers, coal miners, assembly-line laborers, waitresses, ...hoboes, and other working and poor people in an attempt to gain a fuller and more authentic understanding of the lives of the working class and the poor. In this first, sweeping study of undercover investigations of work and poverty in America, award-winning historian Mark Pittenger examines how intellectuals were shaped by their experiences with the poor, and how despite their sympathy toward working-class people, they unintentionally helped to develop the contemporary concept of a degraded and "other" American underclass. While contributing to our understanding of the history of American social thought,Class Unknownoffers a new perspective on contemporary debates over how we understand and represent our own society and its class divisions.
In Privilege and Anxiety , Hagen Koo examines what has
happened to the Korean middle class in the era of neoliberal
globalization and demonstrates that global economic change brought
more profound ...changes than mere economic decline and shrinking size
to this class.
Globalization has inserted an axis of polarization into the
middle class, separating a small minority that benefits from the
globalized economy from the large majority that suffers from it.
This internal differentiation generates a challenging dynamic
within Korean society, as the newly affluent seek to distinguish
themselves from the rest of the middle class to establish a new,
privileged class position. Privilege and Anxiety explores
how these tensions play out in three areas: consumption and
lifestyle, residential differentiation, and education. In all three
areas, the dominant orientation of the affluent middle class is to
preserve their newfound privilege and to pass it onto their
children. Their new class practices, Koo argues, bring great
anxiety to both the winners and losers of neoliberal
globalization.
In fin-de-siècle and early revolutionary Russia, a group of self-educated workers produced a large body of poetry and prose in which they attempted to comprehend their rapidly changing world. ...Witnesses to wars and revolution, these men and women grappled on paper with the nature of civilization and the imperatives of ethical truth. In a strikingly original approach to Russian culture, Mark D. Steinberg listens to their words, which are little known today. The results of their literary creativity, he finds, were frequently not what the new Soviet order was expecting from its workers, despite its celebration of the notion of a proletarian art. Through insightful readings of a vast fund of lower-class writings, Steinberg shows that the authors focused above all on the uncertain nature and place of the self, the promise and dangers of modernity, and the qualities of the sacred in both their lives and their imaginations. Like their counterparts in the intelligentsia, these worker writers were ambivalent about Marxist ideology's celebration of the city and the factory and even about modern progress itself. Drawing on vast research, Steinberg demonstrates the texts' significance for an understanding of Russian popular mentalities, indeed for the very meaning, philosophically and morally, of these years of crisis and possibility at the end of the old order and the early years of the Soviet regime.
InChurch and Estate, Thomas Rzeznik examines the lives and religious commitments of the Philadelphia elite during the period of industrial prosperity that extended from the late nineteenth century ...through the 1920s. The book demonstrates how their religious beliefs informed their actions and shaped their class identity, while simultaneously revealing the ways in which financial influences shaped the character of American religious life. In tracing those connections, it shows how religion and wealth shared a fruitful, yet ultimately tenuous, relationship.
America has a long tradition of middle-class radicalism, albeit one that intellectual orthodoxy has tended to obscure.The Radical Middle Classseeks to uncover the democratic, populist, and even ...anticapitalist legacy of the middle class. By examining in particular the independent small business sector or petite bourgeoisie, using Progressive Era Portland, Oregon, as a case study, Robert Johnston shows that class still matters in America. But it matters only if the politics and culture of the leading player in affairs of class, the middle class, is dramatically reconceived.
This book is a powerful combination of intellectual, business, labor, medical, and, above all, political history. Its author also humanizes the middle class by describing the lives of four small business owners: Harry Lane, Will Daly, William U'Ren, and Lora Little. Lane was Portland's reform mayor before becoming one of only six senators to vote against U.S. entry into World War I. Daly was Oregon's most prominent labor leader and a onetime Socialist. U'Ren was the national architect of the direct democracy movement. Little was a leading antivaccinationist.
The Radical Middle Classfurther explores the Portland Ku Klux Klan and concludes with a national overview of the American middle class from the Progressive Era to the present. With its engaging narrative, conceptual richness, and daring argumentation, it will be welcomed by all who understand that reexamining the middle class can yield not only better scholarship but firmer grounds for democratic hope.
A passionate account of how the gulf between France's metropolitan elites and its working classes are tearing the country apartChristophe Guilluy, a French geographer, makes the case that France has ...become an "American society"-one that is both increasingly multicultural and increasingly unequal. The divide between the global economy's winners and losers in today's France has replaced the old left-right split, leaving many on "the periphery."As Guilluy shows, there is no unified French economy, and those cut off from the country's new economic citadels suffer disproportionately on both economic and social fronts. In Guilluy's analysis, the lip service paid to the idea of an "open society" has emerged in France as a smoke screen meant to hide the emergence of a closed society, walled off for the benefit of the upper classes. The ruling classes in France are reaching a dangerous stage, he argues; without the stability of a growing economy, the hope for those excluded from growth is extinguished, undermining the legitimacy of a multicultural nation.
