The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford

The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford
Author: Beth Tompkins Bates
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2012
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807835641

In the 1920s, Henry Ford hired thousands of African American men for his open-shop system of auto manufacturing. This move was a rejection of the notion that better jobs were for white men only. In The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford

Disobedience and Democracy

Disobedience and Democracy
Author: Howard Zinn
Publisher: eBookIt.com
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2012-05-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1456609920

Howard Zinn's cogent defense of civil disobedience with a new introduction by the author. In this slim volume, Zinn lays out a clear and dynamic case for civil disobedience and protest, and challenges the dominant arguments against forms of protest that challenge the status quo. Zinn explores the politics of direct action, nonviolent civil disobedience, and strikes, and draws lessons for today.

Power in Our Hands

Power in Our Hands
Author: William Bigelow
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 195
Release: 1988
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0853457530

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

The Many Worlds of American Communism

The Many Worlds of American Communism
Author: Joshua Morris
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 533
Release: 2022-09-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1793631964

This book explores the multifaceted dimensions that make up the American communist movement from its early years in the 1920s to its peak in the years leading up to World War II. The author argues that in order to effectively understand a social movement, it is necessary to take an approach that differentiates between the political-, social-, and labor-oriented motivations taken by the movement's participants. By exploring the political, community, and labor dimensions of American communism, the author helps convey the complex nature of social movements and the various ways they attempted to create agency in their society.

American Automobile Workers, 1900-1933

American Automobile Workers, 1900-1933
Author: Joyce Shaw Peterson
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 1987-01-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780887065736

“The book is a first-rate social history of automobile workers in the pre-union era. I wish that I had written it.” — Stephen Meyer, University of Wisconsin-Parkside This book is a comprehensive history of automobile workers in the pre-union era. It covers changes in the kinds of workers who staffed the auto factories, developments in the labor process and in overall conditions of work, daily life outside the factories, informal responses of workers to routinized, monotonous, and highly structured work, and automobile worker unions before the creation of the United Automobile Workers. Although the 1920s were seen at the time as a period of peaceful and cooperative labor relations, author Joyce Peterson looks beneath the surface to discover the many ways in which auto workers expressed their displeasure with and attempted to fight against working conditions. The book also examines the Briggs strike of 1933, the first strike to significantly register the impact of the Great Depression upon the automobile industry and to mark the end of the pre-union era. The automobile industry was a model of twentieth century mass production techniques, of managerial organization, and of labor relations. Studying automobile workers in their historical and social setting explains a great deal about the nature of modern industry—how it affects the daily life and work of employees and how workers see themselves as individuals and members of a working class.

Talking Union

Talking Union
Author: Judith Stepan-Norris
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1996
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780252064890

Members of the United Auto Workers Ford Local 600 tell about their activism as they experienced it.

The People's Tycoon

The People's Tycoon
Author: Steven Watts
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 656
Release: 2009-03-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307558975

How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford’s outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. The real Henry Ford was a tangle of contradictions. He set off the consumer revolution by producing a car affordable to the masses, all the while lamenting the moral toll exacted by consumerism. He believed in giving his workers a living wage, though he was entirely opposed to union labor. He had a warm and loving relationship with his wife, but sired a son with another woman. A rabid anti-Semite, he nonetheless embraced African American workers in the era of Jim Crow. Uncovering the man behind the myth, situating his achievements and their attendant controversies firmly within the context of early twentieth-century America, Watts has given us a comprehensive, illuminating, and fascinating biography of one of America’s first mass-culture celebrities.

Savage City

Savage City
Author: Donald Levin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2021-11-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780997294187

Savage City is a historical crime novel that follows four characters during a bloody week of labor unrest in the depths of the Great Depression in Detroit, Michigan, the hardest hit city in the nation. Weaving together fact and fiction, the book connects the investigation of a racially motivated murder; a vendetta by the notorious Purple Gang; the Ford Hunger March that resulted in the deaths of five unemployed workers in March 1932; the beginnings of the Black Legion, a real-life group of violent white supremacists that terrorized Michigan and the Midwest in the early 1930s; and an assassination plot against the mayor of the City of Detroit.