White working class Americans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found themselves in a social order that was fundamentally reorganizing itself. The railroads stitched the nation together at the same time as they began to wrench people and communities out of their rural or agrarian ways of life. The abolishment of slavery meant that agriculture needed to be altered within the south, and it drove many Americans to seek out new ways to reassert the racial hierarchies that had so long been the heart of America's social order. Some working class whites looked to new political movements to answer the emerging questions and difficulties of the changing times. Many acted to strengthen the labor movement, but found fierce and violent resistance from businessmen and corporations. Ultimately, it was a difficult and perilous time for the white working class, fraught with numerous failures and some successes. Essentially, the emergence of the industrial age restructured American society in ways that relied upon old class and ethnic divisions but in entirely new ways.
One of the most significant ways in which the western world changed during after the Civil War is associated with transportation. Primarily, this change was brought about by advancements in the refining of steel, and the invention of the steam engine. The consequences for travel and commerce in the United States and Europe were enumerable. Additionally, the social makeup of the land was drastically changed by these forces. In the United States, for example, when the Union Pacific Railroads traversed the thousands of miles of American soil; often, if the railways failed to pass through an existing town, the people moved away; in fact, new towns and cities were often formed by virtue of where the railroads converged. This began another large trend that would continue to this day: the urbanization of the developed world.
Essentially, it...
Segregation and the Rise of the White Working Class The primary theme of the reading entitled "Segregation and the Rise of the White Working Class," which is the third chapter in William Julius Wilson's book The Declining Significance of Race, is the economic reasons for racial subjugation in the United States. The author provides a plethora of evidence that indicates that money and varying economic principles intertwined with class and Marxism
Each brings the evidence to light by utilizing a different set of sources, one slightly more personal and narrative than the other but both clearly expressive of the expansion of the ideals of America as a "white" masculine society of working class people that needed and obtained voice through ideals that attempted, at least to some degree to skirt the issue of race. Race was represented in both works
Skinheads Movement in America "Skinheads' is a group of whites who are responsible for creating racial discrimination and prejudice in the United States. They were a very prominent, deviant and often violent sub-culture existing in the country in 1980s. A sub-culture is different from a minority group because the latter is primarily based on ethnic background while the former is grounded in value system. A person who joins a sub-culture is
"I was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery," wrote Frederick Douglas as he describes the horrors in which he had to work in slavery. "We were worked in all weathers... work, work, work, the longest days were too short for him, and the shortest nights too long for him" (Bayliss 57), helping to show what was expected of the slaves. Slaves had to work under horrid conditions as much as possible, and they
American Political Culture and Values In Hellfire Nation (2003) James Morone described U.S. history as cyclical, with alternating generational cycles of reform and conservatism that can be traced back to the colonial period. In the 20th Century, the reform periods were the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Great Society of the 1960s, while the 1920s, 1950s and 1980s were eras of conservatism. Religion, culture and sexual morality also follow
American Ethnic Culture What is an American? It is clear that Progressive era Americans from different backgrounds differentially defined precisely what being an American actually meant. Stephen Meyer wrote in the work entitled "Efforts at Americanization in the Industrial Workplace 1914-1921 that Americanization "…involved the social and cultural assimilation of immigrants into the mainstream of American life…" but that the process was of the nature that was comprised of "a unique and distinctly
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