Author: David Bates File Type: pdf Between 1910 and 1920, the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) inaugurated a massive organizing drive in the citys meatpacking and steel industries. Although the CFL sought legitimately progressive goals, worked earnestly to organize an interracial union, and made major inroads among both black and white workers, their efforts resulted in a bitter defeat. David Bates provides a clear picture of how even the most progressive of intentions can be ground to a halt. By organizing workers into neighborhood locals, which connected workplace struggles to ethnic and religious identities, the CFL facilitated a surge in the organizations membership, particularly among African American workers, and afforded the federation the opportunity to aggressively confront employers. The CFLs innovative structure, however, was ultimately its demise. Linking union locals to neighborhoods proved to be a form of de facto segregation. Over time union structures, rank-and-file conflicts, and employer resistance combined to turn the unions hopeful calls for solidarity into animosity and estrangement. Tensions were exacerbated by violent shop floor confrontations and exploded in the bloody 1919 Chicago Race Riot. By the early 1920s, the CFL had collapsed. The Ordeal of the Jungle explores the choices of a variety of people while showing a complex, overarching interplay of black and white workers and their employers. In addition to analyzing union structures and on-the-ground relations between workers, Bates synthesizes and challenges previous scholarship on interracial organizing to explain the failure of progressive unionism in Chicago. **Review The Ordeal of the Jungle is a timely contribution to the ongoing conversation between the past and the present not only in the fields of labor and African American history but also in movements for the advancement of working people and people of color.Peter Rachleff,author of Black Labor in Richmond, 18651890 In this absorbing study, David Bates charts the spectacular rise and equally dramatic fall of the Chicago Federation of Labors World War I era campaign to organize the citys stockyards across lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and skill.Paul Michel Taillon, author of Good, Reliable, White Men Railroad Brotherhoods, 18771917 The Ordeal of the Jungle deftly blends perspectives of union leaders, rank-and-file workers, strikebreakers, and employers to show how aspects of class and race determined the fate of ambitious organizing drives in Chicagos stockyards and steel mills. Batess methodology and nuanced interpretation exemplify the promise of a new generation of labor historians.Michael K. Rosenow, author of Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865 1920 Bates offers a vivid account of the Chicago labor movements failed attempts to promote a progressive brand of interracial unionism early in the twentieth century. Through a masterful synthesis of the old and new labor histories, Bates illuminates how employer predation, union miscues, and rank-and-file conflict worked together to undercut solidarity and with it hopes of racial change and economic justice. A vital retelling with important lessons for both historians and labororganizers.Kerry Pimblott, author of Faith in Black Power Race, Religion, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois About the Author David Bates is an assistant professor of history at Concordia University Chicago. He is a regular contributor to the Illinois Reading Council Journal and has also contributed to the Journal of Interdisciplinary History and The Encyclopedia of American Reform Movements.

Author: Patrick Cockburn File Type: epub From the award-winning author of The Rise of Islamic State, the essential story of the Middle Easts disintegration The Age of Jihad charts the turmoil of todays Middle East and the devastating role the West has played in the region from 2001 to the present. Beginning with the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, Cockburn explores the vast geopolitical struggle that is the SunniShia conflict, a clash that shapes the war on terror, western military interventions, the evolution of the insurgency, the civil wars in Yemen, Libya and Syria, the Arab Spring, the fall of regional dictators, and the rise of Islamic State. As Cockburn shows in arresting detail, Islamic State did not explode into existence in Syria in the wake of the Arab Spring, as conventional wisdom would have it. The organization gestated over several years in occupied Iraq, before growing to the point where it can threaten the stability of the whole region. Cockburn was the first Western journalist to warn of the dangers posed by Islamic State. His originality and breadth of vision make The Age of Jihad the most in-depth analysis of the regional crisis in the Middle East to date. **

Author: Martin Heidegger File Type: pdf

Author: A. J. P. Taylor File Type: pdf This is the only history, in any language, of the Habsburg Monarchy from the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 until its own dissolution in 1918. It begins with Metternich and ends with Masaryk and the national revolutions. Its theme is the attempt of the Habsburg Emperors and their servants to maintain a great Imperial organisation above the nationalities, which would give central Curope peace and stability and it analyses the intellectual and social forces, born in the nineteenth century, which brought this attempt to failure. from the dust jacket **