Focusing on the operation and influence of the Knights of Labor—the leading labor organization of the nineteenth century—Workingmen's Democracy explores the dreams, achievements, and failures of a movement that sought to renew the democratic potential of American institutions. Runner-up in both the John H. Dunning Prize and Albert J. Beveridge Award competitions

Focusing on the operation and influence of the Knights of Labor—the leading labor organization of the nineteenth century—Workingmen's Democracy explores the dreams, achievements, and failures of a movement that sought to renew the democratic potential of American institutions. Runner-up in both the John H. Dunning Prize and Albert J. Beveridge Award competitions

a study of the southern community of Salem, North Carolina, a Moravian community of artisans and small farmers, as it was transformed over just a few decades during the 19th century from an agricultural region into the home of the smokestacks and office towers of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and the Wachovia Bank and Trust Company. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Chants Democratic is a fascinating reinterpretation of the origins and development of our nation's working class, as seen through the politics, culture, and ideas of New York City during the Jacksonian period. Here, Wilentz explores the dramatic social and intellectual changes that accompanied early industrialization in New York. Wilentz examines the significant roles played by immigration, religion, and women in the formation of new social classes. Using court records, ceremonial speeches, and art to illuminate the changes of the period, Chants Democratic presents a rich and detailed portrait of the social life, political battles, and cultural development in the emerging American metropolis.

Why did American workers, unlike their European counterparts, fail to forge a class-based movement to pursue broad social reform? Was it simply that they lacked class consciousness and were more interested in personal mobility? In a richly detailed survey of labor law and labor history, William Forbath challenges this notion of American “individualism.” In fact, he argues, the nineteenth-century American labor movement was much like Europe’s labor movements in its social and political outlook, but in the decades around the turn of the century, the prevailing attitude of American trade unionists changed. Forbath shows that, over time, struggles with the courts and the legal order were crucial to reshaping labor’s outlook, driving the labor movement to temper its radical goals.

Arguments over what democracy actually meant in practice and how it should be implemented raged throughout the early American republic. This exploration of the Pennsylvania experience reveals how democracy arose in America and how it came to accommodate capitalism.

Born in Roanoke County, Virginia, on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation, Richard L. Davis was an early mine labor organizer in Rendville, Ohio. One year after the 1884 Great Hocking Valley Coal Strike, which lasted nine months, Davis wrote the first of many letters to the National Labor Tribune and the United Mine Workers Journal. One of two African Americans at the founding convention of United Mine Workers of America in 1890, he served as a member of the National Executive Board in 1886–97. Davis called upon white and black miners to unite against wage slavery. This biography provides a detailed portrait of one of America’s more influential labor organizers.

The authors compare the "public spirited work [that] enabled diverse peoples to forge connection, gain a stake in the nation, and find intellectual challenges [to] a time when people are predominately consumers instead of producers." They offer many current examples which demonstrate encouraging changes.

A new look at how the issues of concern in the public sphere were influenced by journalism and political organizing in American cities in the second half of the 19th century.

Local teachers and ministers extolling the virtues of hard work and loyalty to God and country. Veterans' groups and women's clubs promoting the military fighting radicalism, and equating business and patriotism. Industrial leaders gaining legal as well as moral influence over national domestic policy. Such scenes might seem to be lifted from a Sinclair Lewis novel or a Contract with America publicity video. But as John C. Hennen shows in this piercing analysis of early-twentieth-century American political culture, from 1916 to 1925 "Americanization" became the theme—indeed, the script—not only of West Virginia but of the entire nation. Hennen's interdisciplinary work examines a formative period in West Virginia's modern history that has been largely neglected beyond the traditional focus on the coal industry. Hennen looks at education, reform, and industrial relations in the state in the context of war mobilization, postwar instability, and national economic expansion. The First World War, he says, consolidated the dominant positions of professionals, business people, and political capitalists as arbiters of national values. These leaders emerged from the war determined to make free-market business principles synonymous with patriotic citizenship. Americanization, therefore, refers less to the assimilation of immigrants into the national mainstream than to the attempt to encode values that would guarantee a literate, loyal, and obedient producing class. To ensure that the state fulfilled its designated role as a resource zone for the perceived greater good of national strength, corporate leaders employed public relations tactics that the Wilson administration had refined to gain public support for the war. Alarmed by widespread labor activism and threatened by fears of communism, the American Constitutional Association in West Virginia, one of dozens of similar organizations nationwide, articulated principles that identified the well-being of business with the well-being of the country. With easy access to teacher training and classroom programs, antiunion forces had by 1923 rolled back the wartime gains of the United Mine Workers of America. Middle-class voluntary organizations like the American Legion and the West Virginia Federation of Women's Clubs helped implant mandated loyalty in schoolchildren. Far from being isolated during America's transformation into a world power, West Virginia was squarely in the mainstream. The state's people and natural resources were manipulated into serving crucial functions as producers and fuel for the postwar economy. Hennen's study, therefore, is a study less of the power or force of ideas than of the importance of access to the means to transmit ideas. The winner of the1995 Appalachian Studies Award is a significant contribution to regional studies as well as to our understanding of American culture during and after World War I.