For all those interested in the relationship between the memories that permeate the built forms of the past and the pressures exerted by modern life, Harris Stone offers a richly illustrated examination of the seemingly irreconcilable opposition between action (hands-on) and scholarship (hands-off) — between those who want to preserve the past as a museum of dead relics and those who want to treat it as a part of contemporary life. | more…
The Great Reversal is the first critical study of the widely heralded reforms currently transforming China’s economy. From his long experience in Chinese agriculture, Hinton first examines the course of agricultural reform over the past decade, then looks at its consequences in different areas of the countryside and considers its implications for the country as a whole. He raises troubling questions about China’s capitalist future—the growing landlessness, increasing inequality, and above all, the destruction of the nation’s natural resources and the collectively built infrastructure that was the great achievement of the revolution. In so doing he sheds new light on the sources of discontent behind the demonstrations that culminated in the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989. | more…
To understand the complex phenomenon of fascism and its success in Germany requires an integrated analysis of the economic, class, and power dimensions that led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the ascension to power of the Nazi party. The contributors to this volume, including a number of scholars from East and West Germany whose works appear in English for the first time, collectively construct such an analysis. | more…
This celebrated book provides entertaining, easy-to-use lesson plans for teaching labor history. “Most school teachers are drowned in paper, but here is one book I want to recommend to them. It is a way of getting American teenagers not just interested, but excited and passionate about their history—modern American labor history.” —Pete Seeger | more…
[Britannica’s revisionist] distortions of the history of the Vietnamese struggle are just as radical and just as misleading [as those about the Soviet Union]. Here we may draw some valuable lessons about the hidden content of form: how apparently neutral principles of organization may shape meaning. | more…
At the turn of the century, millions of European women set sail with their families for the United States. Behind them stood a world of peasant agriculture and small town life. Ahead lay the concrete metropolis, swept by the winds of industrial development. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars tells the story of the Jewish and Italian women who came to inhabit New York’s Lower East Side during this period of massive migration. By looking at two generations — mothers born in the Old World, and daughters born in the new — and making extensive use of oral histories, Elizabeth Ewen presents the compelling tale of a metamorphosis in life and in perception. | more…
This collection of essays analyzes the experience of women in Weimar and Nazi Germany — the first a period of crisis and polarization between right and left, and the second a period in which the right triumphed. The history documented in this book provides us with a perspective from which to analyze our own time, for in the history of Weimar and Nazi Germany we see the issues surrounding women, family, and reproduction as powerful mobilizing forces for both right and left. | more…
When Bernardo Vega arrived in New York from Puerto Rico in 1916, he was at the forefront of a migrant stream that was soon to become a flood. His memoirs—perceptive, lively, and politically aware—provide us with a unique and often humorous firsthand account of the life of an immigrant, as well as of the concerns and activities of the Puerto Rican community in New York in the period between the wars. | more…
Explores Marx’s attitude to “developing” societies. Includes translations of Marx’s notes from the 1880s, among the most important finds of the last century. | more…
A careful analysis of the Bank’s own policy papers and reports, which outlines its philosophy of development and the concrete effects of its projects. | more…
The alliance of the industrial labor movement with the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt has, perhaps more than any other factor, shaped the course of class relations in the United States over the ensuing forty years. Much has been written on the interests that were thereby served, and those that were co-opted. In this detailed examination of the strategies pursued by both radical labor and the capitalist class in the struggle for industrial unionism, David Milton argues that while radical social change and independent political action were traded off by the industrial working class for economic rights, this was neither automatic nor inevitable. Rather, the outcome was the result of a fierce struggle in which capital fought labor and both fought for control over government labor policy. | more…
