Who speaks for science in a technologically dominated society? In his latest work of cultural criticism Andrew Ross contends that this question yields no simple or easy answer. In our present technoculture a wide variety of people, both inside and outside the scientific community, have become increasingly vocal in exercising their right to speak about, on behalf of, and often against, science and technology. Arguing that science can only ever be understood as a social artifact, Strange Weather is a manifesto which calls on cultural critics to abandon their technophobia and contribute to the...

This collection of essays expands on themes and issues explored in the author's award-winning study, The Wages of Whiteness. The book assumes a multi-disciplinary approach to consider modern white identity.

This work surveys the 200-year history of company towns in the United States - a crucial chapter in the increasingly important area of urban studies. Crawford analyzes the development of the towns in a complex framework involving economic, social and ideological influences: including industrial restructuring and geographic shifts, issues of immigration and ethnic division, and the appearance of state intervention where style and symbolism began to shape the face of urban architecture.

A highly original account of the evolution of the family unit

Current debates about the future of the family are often based on serious misconceptions about its past. Arguing that there is no biologically mandated or universally functional family form, Stephanie Coontz traces the complexity and variety of family arrangements in American history, from Native American kin groups to the emergence of the dominant middle-class family ideal in the 1890s.

Surveying and synthesizing a vast range of previous scholarship, as well as engaging more particular studies of family life from...

Above all, this collection is distinguished by its steadfast refusal to elide the determinate political issues posed by postmodernism. Each of the essays insists upon the materiality of cultural production, locating various postmodernist practices in the social conditions of contemporary life, including the overarching structures of gender and class.

Over the past decade American labor has faced a tidal wave of wage cuts, plant closures and broken strikes. In this first comprehensive history of the labor movement from Truman to Reagan, Kim Moody shows how the AFL-CIO's conservative ideology of "business unionism" effectively disarmed unions in the face of a domestic right turn and an epochal shift to globalized production. Eschewing alliances with new social forces in favor of its old Cold War liaisons and illusory compacts with big business, the AFL-CIO under George Meany and Lane Kirkland has been forced to surrender many of its...

The author discusses his background, movie making, England travel, the U.S., and American politics.

In this collection of essays, the author combines a series of assessments of classic and lost texts in the US Marxist literary tradition, and analyzes developments in Marxist scholarship by Robin Kelley, Michael Lowy, James Murphy, Paula Rabinowitz and Alexander Saxton. Discussion of fiction, poetry and cultural history is given central place in Wald's analysis. From this perspective he argues that the contemporary concerns of race, gender and culture have created a powerful new leftist critique.

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For the first time in a generation chain gangs have reappeared on the roads of the American South. Associated in the past with racial terrorism, this cruel and unusual punishment should invoke strong memories. But, in the rush to embrace ever-harsher sanctions, the American public has ignored the troubling history of Southern punishment.

Twice the Work of Free Labor is the first book-length study of the history of the Southern convict-lease system and its successor, the chain gang. For nearly a century after the abolition of slavery, convicts labored in the South's mines, railroad...