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The year 1929 represents a major turning point for interwar Jewish society, proving to be a year when Jews, regardless of where they lived, saw themselves affected by developments that took place around the world, as the crises endured by other Jews became part of the transnational Jewish consciousness. In the United States, the stock market crash brought lasting economic, social, and ideological changes to the Jewish community and limited its ability to support humanitarian and nationalist projects in other countries. In Palestine, the anti-Jewish riots in Hebron and other towns underscored the vulnerability of the Zionist enterprise and ignited heated discussions among various Jewish political groups about the wisdom of establishing a Jewish state on its historical site. At the same time, in the Soviet Union, the consolidation of power in the hands of Joseph Stalin created a much more dogmatic climate in the international Communist movement, including its Jewish branches. This book surveys the Jewish world in one year offering clear examples of the transnational connections which linked Jews to each other—from politics, diplomacy, and philanthropy to literature, culture, and the fate of Yiddish—regardless of where they lived. The book argues that, whether American, Soviet, German, Polish, or Palestinian, Jews throughout the world lived in a global context.

In the early 1930s, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) organized large numbers of Black and Hispanic workers through a broadly conceived program of education, culture, and community involvement. The ILGWU admitted these new members, the overwhelming majority of whom were women, into racially integrated local unions and created structures to celebrate ethnic differences. This book revolves around this phenomenon of interracial union building and worker education during the Great Depression. Investigating why immigrant Jewish unionists in the ILGWU appealed to an international force of coworkers, the book traces their ideology of a working-class-based cultural pluralism, which it newly terms “mutual culturalism,” back to the revolutionary experiences of Russian Jewish women. These militant women and their male allies constructed an ethnic identity derived from Yiddish socialist tenets based on the principle of autonomous national cultures in the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire. The book offers a fresh perspective on the nature of ethnic identity and working-class consciousness and contributes to current debates about the origins of multiculturalism.

This is the story of English Country Dance, from its 18th-century roots in the English cities and countryside, to its transatlantic leap to the United States in the 20th century. The book argues that the history of country and folk dancing in America is deeply intermeshed with that of political liberalism and the “old left.” The book situates folk dancing within surprisingly diverse contexts, from progressive era reform, and playground and school movements, to the changes in consumer culture, and the project of a modernizing, cosmopolitan middle-class society. Tracing the spread of folk dancing, with particular emphases on English Country Dance, International Folk Dance, and Contra, the book connects the history of folk dance to social and international political influences in America. Through archival research, oral histories, and ethnography of dance communities, it allows dancers and dancing bodies to speak. From the norms of the first half of the century, marked strongly by Anglo-Saxon traditions, to the Cold War nationalism of the post-war era, and finally on to the counterculture movements of the 1970s, the book injects the riveting history of folk dance in the middle of the story of modern America.

This book is a historical and anthropological study of the racial dimensions of airline travel. It analyzes the colonial beginnings of a seemingly national airline: British Airways. It focuses on the airline’s inauguration as Imperial Airways in the 1920s to its rebranding as the British Overseas Airways Corporation in the 1930s. It pays particular attention to the role that the colonial Caribbean played in the making of transatlantic airline travel, a region that is often left out of early air travel history. Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research that was carried out on the ground and while in the air throughout the Atlantic world, it calls attention to race and racism as central to the creation of commercial air travel. It argues that racial oppression was not only a consequence of airline travel. It was also its maker. By attending first and foremost to the role of race in the industry’s inception, the book reveals critical links between empire and airline travel. It blends creative nonfiction with more conventional forms of academic writing in order to highlight the significance of fragmentary evidence, imagination, and diasporic love when seeking to grasp the complexities of aerial mobility and colonialism. In addition to allowing for a critical analysis of race, this uncommon approach makes a case for different researching and reading practices within and beyond history and anthropology. It affords an opportunity to “un-ground” knowledge production and reconfigure how everyday airline travel is understood and experienced as an ordinary cultural practice.

Maligned by modern media and often stereotyped, Italian Americans possess a vibrant, if largely forgotten, radical past. This book delves into the history of the sovversivi, a transnational generation of social rebels, and offers a fascinating portrait of their political struggle as well as their milieu, beliefs, and artistic creativity in the United States. As early as 1882, the sovversivi founded a socialist club in Brooklyn. Radical organizations then multiplied and spread across the country, from large urban cities to smaller industrial mining areas. By 1900, thirty official Italian sections of the Socialist Party along the East Coast and countless independent anarchist and revolutionary circles sprang up throughout the nation. Forming their own alternative press, institutions, and working class organizations, these groups created a vigorous movement and counterculture that constituted a significant part of the American Left until World War II. The book documents the wide spectrum of this oppositional culture and examines the many cultural and artistic forms it took, from newspapers to literature and poetry to theater and visual art. As the first cultural history of Italian American activism, it provides a richer understanding of the Italian immigrant experience while also deepening historical perceptions of radical politics and culture.

This book explores the intertwined histories of Jews and the American Left through a rich variety of primary documents. Written in English and Yiddish, these documents reflect the entire spectrum of radical opinion, from anarchism to social democracy, Communism to socialist-Zionism. Rank-and-file activists, organizational leaders, intellectuals, and commentators, from within the Jewish community and beyond, all have their say. Their stories crisscross the Atlantic, spanning from the United States to Europe and British-ruled Palestine. The documents illuminate in fascinating detail the efforts of large numbers of Jews to refashion themselves as they confronted major problems of the twentieth century: poverty, anti-semitism, the meaning of American national identity, war, and totalitarianism. This book tells the story of Jewish radicals over seven decades for the first time in their own words.

From kosher wine to their ties to the liquor trade in Europe, Jews have a longstanding historical relationship with alcohol. But once prohibition hit America, American Jews were forced to choose between abandoning their historical connection to alcohol and remaining outside the American mainstream. This book examines American Jews' long and complicated relationship with alcohol during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the years of the national prohibition movement's rise and fall. Bringing to bear an extensive range of archival materials, the book offers a novel perspective on a previously unstudied area of American Jewish economic activity—the making and selling of liquor, wine, and beer—and reveals that alcohol commerce played a crucial role in Jewish immigrant acculturation and the growth of Jewish communities in the United States. But prohibition's triumph cast a pall on American Jews' history in the alcohol trade, forcing them to revise, clarify, and defend their communal and civic identities, both to their fellow Americans and to themselves.

This book showcases the transformations that the intellectual and political production of women's history has engendered across time and space. It considers the difference women's and gender history has made to, and within, national fields of study, and to what extent the wider historiography has integrated this new knowledge. What are the accomplishments of women's and gender history? What are its shortcomings? What is its future? The chapters discuss the discovery of women's histories, the multiple turns the field has taken, and how place affected the course of this scholarship, from such historiographically defined vantage points as Tsarist Russia, the British Empire in Egypt and India, Qing-dynasty China, and the United States roiling through the 1960s. The book surveys trajectories in the creation of women's histories in recent and distant pasts and envisions their futures.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, modern urban, industrial, affluent societies have made great strides towards fixing some of the problems that plagued other societies for centuries: food shortages are nearly eliminated, infant and maternal mortality has fallen dramatically, birth control is both readily available and effective, education levels are higher, and internal violence is significantly reduced. Modernity's blessings are many and bountiful—but has modernity really made us happy? This book is about the modern condition, and why the gains of living in modern urban, industrial, affluent societies have not proved more satisfying than they have. It examines why real results that paralleled earlier anticipations of progress have not generated the ease and contentment that the same forecasters assumed would apply to modern life. The book asks why, if modern life has been generally characterized by measurable themes of progress, abundance, and improvement, are people not happier or more content with their lot in life? Why is there an increased incidence of psychological depression, anxiety, and the sense that no one has ever reached a pinnacle of happiness or contentment? It's not so much that modernity went wrong, but rather that it has not gone as swimmingly as was anticipated. The book uses concrete examples from both history and the present, such as happiness surveys, to discuss how as a society we might better juggle the demands of modern life with the pursuit of happiness.

From Ernest and Julio Gallo to Francis Ford Coppola, Italians have shaped the history of California wine. More than any other group, Italian immigrants and their families have made California viticulture one of America's most distinctive and vibrant achievements, from boutique vineyards in the Sonoma hills to the massive industrial wineries of the Central Valley. But how did a small group of nineteenth-century immigrants plant the roots that flourished into a world-class industry? Was there something particularly “Italian” in their success? This book demonstrates that these Italian visionaries were not skilled winemakers transplanting an immemorial agricultural tradition, even if California did resemble the rolling Italian countryside of their native Piedmont. Instead, the book argues that it was the winemakers' access to “social capital,” or the ethnic and familial ties that bound them to their rich wine-growing heritage, and not financial leverage or direct enological experience, that enabled them to develop such a successful and influential wine business. Focusing on some of the most important names in wine history—particularly Pietro Carlo Rossi, Secondo Guasti, and the Gallos—the book chronicles a story driven by ambition and creativity but realized in a complicated tangle of immigrant entrepreneurship, class struggle, racial inequality, and a new world of consumer culture, and takes us on a journey into the cultural construction of ethnic economies and markets, the social dynamics of American race, and the fully transnational history of American wine.

Since the early twentieth century, thousands of Mexican Americans have lived, worked, and formed communities in Chicago's steel mill neighborhoods. This book tells the story of a vibrant, active community that continues to play a central role in American politics and society. Examining how the fortunes of Mexicans in South Chicago were linked to the environment they helped to build, the book offers new insights into how and why Mexican Americans created community. It investigates the years between the world wars, the period that witnessed the first, massive influx of Mexicans into Chicago. South Chicago Mexicans lived in a neighborhood whose literal and figurative boundaries were defined by steel mills, which dominated economic life for Mexican immigrants. Yet while the mills provided jobs for Mexican men, they were neither the center of community life nor the source of collective identity. The book argues that the Mexican immigrant and Mexican American men and women who came to South Chicago created physical and imagined community not only to defend against the ever-present social, political, and economic harassment and discrimination, but to grow in a foreign, polluted environment. It reconstructs the everyday strategies the working-class Mexican American community adopted to survive in areas from labor to sports to activism.

Beginning with the chaotic communal moment of the Renaissance faire's founding and early development in the 1960s through its incorporation as a major “family friendly” leisure site in the 2000s, this book tells the story of the thinkers, artists, clowns, mimes, and others performers who make the faire. It approaches the faire from the perspective of labor, education, aesthetics, business, the opposition it faced, and the key figures involved. The book reveals the way the faires established themselves as a pioneering and highly visible countercultural referendum on how we live now—our family and sexual arrangements, our relationship to consumer goods, and our corporate entertainments. In order to understand the meaning of the faire to its devoted participants, both workers and visitors, the book includes an array of testimony, from extensive conversations with faire founder Phyllis Patterson to interviews regarding the contemporary scene with performers, crafters, booth workers and “playtrons.” The book pays equal attention to what came out of the faire—the transforming gifts bestowed by the faire's innovations and experiments upon the broader American culture: the underground press of the 1960s and 1970s, experimentation with “ethnic” musical instruments and styles in popular music, the craft revival, and various forms of immersive theater are all connected back to their roots in the faire.

During the early nineteenth century, schools for the deaf appeared in the United States for the first time. These schools were committed to the use of sign language to educate deaf students. Manual education made the growth of the deaf community possible, for it gathered deaf people together in sizable numbers for the first time in American history. It also fueled the emergence of deaf culture, as the schools became agents of cultural transformations. Just as the deaf community began to be recognized as a minority culture, in the 1850s, a powerful movement arose to undo it, namely oral education. Advocates of oral education, deeply influenced by the writings of public school pioneer Horace Mann, argued that deaf students should stop signing and should start speaking in the hope that the deaf community would be abandoned, and its language and culture would vanish. This book explores the educational battles of the nineteenth century from both hearing and deaf points of view. It places the growth of the deaf community at the heart of the story of deaf education and explains how the unexpected emergence of deafness provoked the pedagogical battles that dominated the field of deaf education in the nineteenth century, and still reverberate today.