Labor's mind : a history of working-class intellectual life / Tobias Higbie.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Higbie, Frank Tobias, author.

Series:

Working class in American history.

The working class in American history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Working class--United States--Intellectual life.

Working class.

Working class--Education--United States.

Labor movement--United States--History--20th century.

Labor movement.

United States--Intellectual life--20th century.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (177 pages).

Place of Publication:

Urbana ; Chicago ; Springfield : University of Illinois Press, [2019]

Summary:

Business leaders, conservative ideologues, and even some radicals of the early twentieth century dismissed working people's intellect as stunted, twisted, or altogether missing. They compared workers toiling in America's sprawling factories to animals, children, and robots. Working people regularly defied these expectations, cultivating the knowledge of experience and embracing a vibrant subculture of self-education and reading. Labor's Mind uses diaries and personal correspondence, labor college records, and a range of print and visual media to recover this social history of the working-class mind. As Higbie shows, networks of working-class learners and their middle-class allies formed nothing less than a shadow labor movement. Dispersed across the industrial landscape, this movement helped bridge conflicts within radical and progressive politics even as it trained workers for the transformative new unionism of the 1930s. Revelatory and sympathetic, Labor's Mind reclaims a forgotten chapter in working-class intellectual life while mapping present-day possibilities for labor, higher education, and digitally enabled self-study.

Contents:

Introduction

"A little avenue to self-mastery": the social world of working-class readers

"All sorts of wild, impassioned talk": open forums and the working-class public sphere

"To see and hear things that have always been there": labor's pedagogy of the organized

Brain workers in the house of labor: life stories and the politics of experience

Icons of ignorance and enlightenment: the visual culture of critical consciousness

Conclusion: self-education in the shadow of the Cold War.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780252051098

0252051092