Southwest Washington labor history has received little examination by scholars. Focusing mainly on Seattle, Everett, Centralia, and Spokane, historians view Southwest Washington, a traditionally conservative community, to be of little importance in the state's overall historical narrative. This thesis corrects that assumption and the omission of Southwest Washington. The failure of the unionization effort in Camas impacted organization in Pacific Northwest paper mills for nearly a decade. Although workers failed to sustain their union, the events in Camas between 1913 and 1918 present an excellent new laboratory and case study to explore the intersection of gender, labor, and politics. Despite rough edges and sometimes missing voices within the extant record of the time, this thesis suggests the potential for historians to dig deep into the archives, produce original scholarship, and tell a forgotten story. This work is also ambitious, striving to examine the role gender, labor, and leftists' politics played in the paper mill city of Camas and Washington State. Chapter one examines the first-ever strike of forty women in the Camas bag factory. Chapter two explores the organization of the mills' first union. Chapter three accounts for the rise and fall of the town's only Socialist mayor. Each of these chapters alone could be the topic of a single study and each involves a particular segment of historical scholarship. The chapters are layered and refer to each other, with layers of context added in each one. The themes of this thesis also orbit around a fight over meaning and historical memory. My research shows that during the tumultuous social, economic, and political events from 1913 to 1918 there was an active erasure and forgetting of people and events. These silencings amid a major uproar in a "labor village" partly accounts for the thinness of the archives and the haunted, subjugated quality of the memory of working peoples' activism in Camas. I suggest that labor, management, and the political establishment were all invested in a particular mythos of Camas as a "labor village." Camas was, and is, a company town and "labor village." Camas had a face-to-face quality to its social relations and members of the community felt pressure to maintain this quality, sometimes in opposition to "outside" voices. This scenario put special demands on the people involved with organizing and activism, as they functioned without the big city anonymity of Seattle or Portland. The Camas story is shorter, more concentrated, and more intimate than the stories of these large urban centers. The brief moment of change around the war strained the fraternal bonds of the town. The pain and injury of this strain in Camas were rhetorically covered and hidden. Most of the residents either never spoke of what happened or willed themselves to forget. The memory and knowledge of the events remain to this day imprisoned within their minds and town. This work intends to, after nearly a hundred years, bring back the memories and question the story told about Camas and about ourselves.

The Centralia Tragedy of 1919 has been represented in numerous works over the course of the past 100 years. The vast majority of them concern the events of the day of the Tragedy, November 11, 1919, and whether a small group of Wobblies – members of a union group known as the International Workers of the World (I.W.W.) – opened fire on a group of parading American Legionnaires. This particular element, whether or not the Wobblies opened fire on the Legionnaires or the Legionnaires actually charged the hall where the Wobblies were staying, has generated significant concern in academic and popular literature since it occurred. This study is less concerned with the events of the day itself, accepting that the full truth might not ever be known. It is instead focused on the collective remembering of that event, and how those recollections splintered into several strands of memory in the nearly 96 years since. It categorizes those strands into three specific ones: the official memory framework, the Labor countermemory framework, and the academic framework. Each strand developed from early in the Tragedy’s history, starting with authors and adherents in the days after a 1920 trial. That trial, which declared the Wobblies guilty of the deaths of four Legionnaires while not holding anyone accountable for the lynching of Wobbly Wesley Everest, generated ample discord among Centralians. This lack of closure prompted the various aggrieved parties to produce books, pamphlets, speeches, protests and even a famed statue in Centralia's main park. Over time, the various perspectives congealed into the distinct strands of memory, which often flared up in conflict between 1930 and the present day.

Because so little has been written concerning the Negro in California and because the dynamic and romantic sequences in the development of this country have always interested me, I have become interested in knowing what part the Negro, free and slave, played in this panorama of events. Were there Negroes with early expeditions? To what extent did they migrate to the West when "gold fever" had become a nation-wide epidemic? Did they find gold? Where did they settle? What did they do? What difficulty did they encounter politically, socially, and economically? These are questions that have filled my mind, and to which I shall endeavor to find the answers.

No description available.

No description available.

Olivia de Havilland’s legal victory over Warner Brothers in 1943 set a new precedent for labor relations in Hollywood. Not an isolated piece of litigation, the resulting law now is referred to by her name. It was the culmination of long struggle for actors in the studio system for representation and fair treatment under the law. Much of the work during Hollywood’s studio era was undertaken by women. They used their positions on screen both to appeal to their individual audiences. More than any other, the female star defined the pictures they performed in and the brand of the studios that employed them. Hollywood’s studio system bound stars like de Havilland contractually for a period of up to seven years, which was the legal limit at the time. This did not stop studios from abusing those legal limits through loopholes like the suspension clause. In 1943, the suspension clause was what Warner Brothers used to keep Olivia de Havilland beyond the seven calendar years she had worked for the studio. Actors rejoiced when the powerful suspension clause was declared unlawful by de Havilland’s suite. With the De Havilland Law, actors were entitled to independence that had previously be reserved for the lucky few.

Claims of customization and control by socio-technical industries are altering the role of consumer and producer. These narratives are often misleading attempts to engage consumers with new forms of technology. By addressing capitalist intent, material, and the reproduction limits of 3-D printed objects’, I observe the aspirational promise of becoming a producer of my own belongings through new networks of production. I am interested in gaining a better understanding of the data consumed that perpetuates hyper-consumptive tendencies for new technological apparatuses. My role as a designer focuses on the resolution of not only the surface of the object through 3-D printing, but the social implications to acknowledge consequential conditions of new forms of consumer technology.

This dissertation tells the tale of al-Mahalla al-Kubra during the transition from handloom crafts to the mechanized textile industry and from a local community to a battleground for the nationalist cause in the first half of the twentieth century. By exploring the relationships between culture, politics, and modern industrialization and how subaltern groups shaped their local experiences of modernity in a setting remote from the central government and the cosmopolitan culture of Cairo and Alexandria, it unpacks the social history of men and women, artisans and workers, notables and fitiwwat who were situated between national capitalism and foreign domination. The goal is to write the history of the society from the bottom up and to write a history that is an alternative to the already established histories of nationalism and colonialism. It provides a historical reconstruction and analysis of the process of assimilation undergone by the recruited peasants into urban industrial life and explores the various ways in which they and the Mahallawiyya negotiated living together and dealt with their mutual hostility on an everyday basis. Identity is the core question in this process of assimilation. Did modern, horizontal class relations actually replace traditional, vertical communal and patronage relations? To what extent did the traditional social institutions help or hinder the process of adapting to forms of social life associated with modern industry? I argue that both vertical class and horizontal communal relations co-existed and sometimes competed. In that fluid dynamic, individuals and groups acted and interacted depending on their socio-economic status, communal commitments, conjuncture or the way that a given situation developed, and a shared, often contested, discourse. / text

At the beginning of the twentieth century, transient laborers in Portland, Oregon faced marginalization and exploitation at the hands of the classes that relied on them for their own prosperity. Portland at this time was poised to flourish as a major population and industrial center of the American West. The industries that fueled the city's growth were dependent on cheap and mobile manual labor made available by the expansion of the nation's railroads. As the city prospered and grew, the elite of the city created and promoted an image of Portland as an Eden of material abundance where industriousness and virtue would lead inevitably to prosperity. There was no room in Portland's booster image for unemployed but otherwise able-bodied men that fueled this prosperity but saw no benefit from it. Their very existence challenged both the image of the city itself, and broader and deeper pillars of American identity. The response to the presence of this mobile, underemployed and largely white male labor class by Portland citizens and institutions was driven by, and in turn helped shape, competing mythologies of both the American West and American masculinity at a time when the country was struggling to define and redefine these constructs. Examining these floating men through their portrayal in popular culture, laws, and charitable efforts of the time exposes a deep anxiety about the notions of worth, gender, and American virtue.

The recent passage of the Swing-Johnson bill by Congress and its approval by the President has been the signal for a general rejoicing throughout the West, and especially in Southern California, the section to be meet directly benefited by this legislation. There has been a widespread feeling that the long fight for Federal development of this great western river is over, and that we may begin shortly to realize some concrete returns upon our investment. Press reports indicate that many are already seeking work on the construction of the dam at Black Canyon, in anticipation of the immediate launching of the project. · "Wild cat" employment agencies have sprung up and are extorting fees from work-seekers by promises of good positions on the construction job. Real estate "sharks" are already active and have promoted the sale of much land which they represent as being situated in a favorable spot for irrigation from water to be impounded by the dam. Much of this land is said by the government to be situated several hundred feet above the level of the proposed dam to be unfit for use even if water were available. To forestall this exploitation of men and land the government has recently issued a timely warning to the effect that it will be at least eighteen months before work on the construction of the dam is actually begun and that no homesteading claims on land under the project will be allowed until its completion which will be about eight years. !his announcement may come as somewhat of a shock to many optimists unacquainted with the actual provisions of the bill, for them it may be said that much depends upon the possibility of reaching a satisfactory solution of the problem of water allocation between California and Arizona. To date such a solution has not been reached and unless Arizona is satisfied it is highly probable that the question will be carried to the courts and long months of litigation ensue. If a satisfactory compromise is reached, the launching of the work will not be· long delayed. Of the ultimate outcome there can be no doubt, and the future seems to hold a very rich promise for the great Southwest. As this subject is approached for study one is somewhat overwhelmed by its many ramifications. The engineering problems alone are of tremendous scope. The legal aspects of the question furnish material for exhaustive study. The political issues tend to claim a greater place than their real merit would seem to justify. While all the different phases of the question are somewhat closely bound together, it has been the purpose of the writer in this study to draw at least a faint line of demarcation and confine it as much as possible to the economic aspects. The Boulder Canyon Project Act proposes a four fold plan of economic development; namely, flood-control, irrigation, power development and domestic water-supply. It is to these features that most attention will be given, together with the historical background of the program. It would be only just at this point to acknowledge the very generous response to calls sent out by the writer for reference material. More than a score of individuals and organizations responded with most gratifying results. Included in these were the governors of the seven states in the Colorado River basin, Senator Hiram W. Johnson and Congressman Philip Swing of California, co-authors of the Swing-Johnson bill; the Chairmen of the Senate and House committees on Irrigation and Reclamation; the Pacific Gas and Electric Company; the Southern California Edison Company; the Boulder Dam Association, and many others.