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This article reviews the book, "Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-1884," by Daniel J. Walkowitz.
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This paper examines charivaris and whitecapping in 19th-century North America. Establishing the presence of the charivan/shivaree over the course of the century and of whitecapping in the years 1885-1905, the study examines two particular ritualistic forms of enforcing community standards and behaviour. Commonly directed against unnatural marriage, sexual offenders, wife beaters, and those who defied acceptable standards of behaviour (including employers and strikebreakers), charivaris and whitecapping posed the threatening order of custom against the rule of law. As such, they challenged, implicitly if not explicitly, a developing bourgeois hegemony. In studying them, we learn much about society and culture, order and disorder, in the 19th-century past, forces crucial to an understanding of the plebeian and working-class communities.
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Provides an analysis of craftsmen throughout history and their connections to social and political radicalism. Examines the influence of skilled craftsmen on the trade union movement as well as the shifts the craft culture underwent over time. Argues that the craft tradition had a significant influence on the labour movement. Concludes by calling upon more historians to appreciate the social and cultural lives of these men and women, so as to uncover their hidden or unrecognized contributions to the modern world.
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[This book] is a study of continuity and change in the lives of skilled workers in Hamilton, Ontario, during a period of economic transformation. Bryan D. Palmer shows how the disruptive influence of devel oping industrial capitalism was counterbalanced by the stabilizing effect of the associational life of the workingman, ranging from the fraternal order and the mechanics' institute to the baseball diamond and the "rough music" of the charivari. On the basis of this social and cultural solidarity, Hamilton's craftsmen fought for and achieved a measure of autonomy on the shop-floor through the practice of workers' control. Working-class thought proved equally adaptable, moving away from the producer ideology and its manufacturer-mechanic alliance toward a recognition of class polarization. Making ample use of contemporary evidence in newspapers, labour journals, and unpublished correspondence, the author discusses such major developments in the class conflict as the nine-hour movement of 1872, the dramatic emergence of the Knights of Labor, and the beginnings of craft unionism after 1890. He finds that the concept of a labour aristocracy has litlle meaning in Hamilton, where skilled workers were the culling edge of the working-class movement, involved in issues which directly related to the experience of their less-skilled brethren. More remarkable than the final attainment of capitalist control of the work place, he concludes, are the long-continued resistance of the Hamilton workers and their success in retaining much of their power in the pre-World War I years. --Publisher's description
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