San Antonio College Library

In what is destined to become one of the most important books published this year, Lillian Rubin takes us inside the lives, hearts, and minds of America's working-class families and lets us hear them speak. With an eloquence rivaling that of her earlier classic, Worlds of Pain, Lillian Rubin lays bare the dreams, disappointments, insecurities, loves, and hates of those she calls "the invisible Americans." Based on nearly four hundred interviews with...

Probes the shattering impact of the feminist and postindustrial revolutions on the American working-class family; an account of how economic insecurity and the sexual revolution are creating "recombinant families," no longer defined by blood ties and traditional gender roles.

"Working-Class New York is the moving story of the creation by workers and their allies of a local social democracy, remarkable in its ambitions and achievements, and the ways it came crashing down. With a keen eye for historical detail and a firm grasp of the intricacies of New York City politics, Freeman shows how the anti-communist purges of the 1950s decimated the ranks of the labor movement and demoralized its idealism, and how the fiscal crisis...

The image of Hitler as a demagogic 'pied piper' leading astray the 'little people' of Austria is as misleading as it is powerful. Nazism and the Working Class in Austria is a case study of the ambiguous relationship between state and society under the Nazis. It places the experience of Austrian industrial workers in the Third Reich in a broader historical context, from the origins of the earliest 'national socialist' movements in the backwaters of...

"Susan Porter Benson takes readers into the budgets and the lives of working-class families in the United States between the two world wars. Focusing on families from regions across America and of differing races and ethnicities, she argues that working-class families of the time were not on the verge of entering the middle class and embracing mass culture. Rather, she contends that during the interwar period such families lived in a context of scarcity...

"Between 1850 and 1945, the issue of male leisure became enmeshed with changing contemporary debates on the encroaching mass society and its implications for good citizenry." "Working-class culture has often been depicted as an atomised and fragmented entity lacking any significant cultural contestation. Drawing on a wealth of primary and secondary source material, this book powerfully challenges these recent assumptions and places social class centre...