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Broad changes in early-modern English society were often reflected in the community via a 'war of words'. A close investigation of the social circumstances of individuals and of the relationships between individuals who were caught up in verbal crime provides a detailed context or 'micro-history' of this phenomenon, which in turn sheds light on the socio-economic changes occurring in the Northwest during this period. Since crimes associated with speech increased fourfold between 1580-1680, an investigation of the symbolic domain of speech is important to an understanding of early-modern society. This includes an investigation of chiding, cursing and scolding. In this thesis, the sources of female power in the early-modern community are examined, as well as the dynamics of ill-will behind female verbal crime. Such crimes are researched from manuscripts of proceedings in the local church courts and quarter sessions, which often provide insights into the popular politics of early-modern towns. By examining such texts, we may access a 'micro-history' of gossip that contributes to the debate over such micro-historical questions as gender, social politics and female social space. Networks of power and factional divisions with the community are revealed by exploring the attitudes of those involved in cases of female verbal crime, since individuals from every walk of life appeared in order to give evidence / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Research of a wide range of primary sources informs this work, including hitherto unstudied local union records, oral testimony, contemporary newspapers, government and employer reports. Conclusions reached in this dissertation are that while the founders of the local trade union movement shared a vision of improving the lot of workers in their employment and in the wider social context, and they endeavoured to establish effective structures and organisation to this end, their efforts were of mixed success. They succeeded eminently in improving and protecting the employment conditions of workers to contemporary expectations through effective exploitation of political and institutional channels and through competent and conservative local leadership. However, the additional and loftier goal of creating a better life for workers outside the workplace through local combined union action were much less successful, foiled not only by overwhelming economic difficulties, but also by a local sense of working-class consciousness which was muted by the particular social and cultural context of Rockhampton.

This thesis analyzes class experiences of workers under flexible and precarious conditions of global neoliberal capitalism and tries to answer to what extent these conditions erode their capacities to develop antagonistic class consciousness and collective struggles. Specifically, based on a fieldwork consisting of semi-structured in-depth interviews with 24 workers living in slums of Istanbul, it deals with cultural analysis of working and daily-life experiences of workers involved in the global production of garments. Three categories of analysis are used: experiences of shame, time and necessity, which respectively suggest that, under conditions of precarity and flexibility, the workers, 1. perceive their class positions as personal and feel themselves inadequate, leading to questioning of self-worth, injuries in the self and individual - but not collective - emancipation attempts to escape from the injuring effects of class / 2. have lost not only their control over their present time through extremely long and irregular working hours / but also are ripped of their capacity to plan/organize their future / 3. live under the burden of continuous and persistent concern over necessities, which results in deep-seated sense of deprivation, impoverishment of life experiences, lack of meaning in this life, killing of hopes and consequentially experience of powerlessness. Yet, despite all these alienating experiences, there are also inchoate seeds of revolt and an alternative worldview, which confirms that class struggle exists even &ndash / and indeed (!) &ndash / in most severe conditions of alienation and will be decisive on the emancipatory dialectics of alienation / nonalienation and making / unmaking of class.

This thesis examines the intellectual foundation of the London Corresponding Society’s (LCS) efforts to reform Britain's Parliamentary democracy in the 1790s. The LCS was a working population group fighting for universal male suffrage and annual parliaments in a decade that was wrought with internal social and governmental tension. Many Britons, especially the aristocracy and those in the government, feared the spread of ideas of republicanism and equality from revolutionary France and responded accordingly by oppressing the freedom of speech and association. At first glance, the LCS appears contradictory: it supported the hierarchical status quo but fought for the voice and representation of the people; and it believed that the foundation for rights was natural but also argued its demands for equal rights were drawn from Britain’s ancient unwritten constitution. This thesis contextualizes these ideas using a contemporary debate, the Burke-Paine controversy, as Edmund Burke was the epitome of eighteenth century conservative constitutionalism in Reflections on the Revolution in France while Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man represented a Lockean interpretation of natural rights and equality. Thus using Reflections and Rights of Man as a framework, this thesis demonstrates that the LCS thoroughly understood its demands for parliamentary reform and uniformly applied its interpretation of natural rights and equality to British constitutionalism and the social and governmental hierarchies.

ABSTRACT For more than fifty years, Philip Levine has successfully written verse and prose on a number of subjects and themes including the complexities of familial relationships, the anarchists of the Spanish Civil War, the importance and effects of memory in life, race relations in the United States, the poet’s Jewish identity, and the very struggles that writing meaningful poetry involves. A cursory look at the scholarship on Levine’s poetry reveals that these are the topics frequently discussed and analyzed. However, as anyone can recognize in the criticism on Levine’s verse, Levine’s reputation does not rest so much on his attention to these themes and topics as it does on his presentation of and sympathies with individuals working in the context of modern industrial society. This dissertation identifies and analyzes Levine’s presentations of work and working-class individuals. Starting with the argument that more scholarship needs to be performed on Levine’s poetry than what currently exists, the dissertation’s first part points to Levine’s reputation in and contributions to American poetry. Proceeding to undertake the further study called for in part one, the second part of the dissertation identifies representative examples of working-class elements within Levine’s poetry and places them within historical context as far as poetry is concerned in general. Part three specifically looks at the ways in which Levine’s poetry expresses and relates to Marx’s idea that all of history revolves around the concept of class struggle. The final section of the dissertation explores how Levine’s poetry represents Marx’s theory of alienation among the working-class, identifying and analyzing key examples from throughout the poet’s oeuvre.

The arguments concerning the trade unionism and working class movement in Turkey as well as the largest confederation, T&uuml / rk-iS, in relation to the involvement in the political arena is debated in this thesis by underlining the lack of class identity among the workers. The main argument is that T&uuml / rk-iS was not established by the will and efforts of the workers. Another major discussion point of the thesis is the nonpartisanship policy of T&uuml / rk-iS. It has been found that T&uuml / rk-iS participated quite actively in the political sphere until the 1980 military intervention. However, the limits of this participation were widely drawn by the major political parties of the country. The thesis defends that there are problems stemming from the lack of class consciousness among the T&uuml / rk-iS workers, the hierarchal structure of T&uuml / rk-iS and the profit oriented approaches of the political parties towards T&uuml / rk-iS.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the class and consciousness formation in a local setting by also developing and applying a theoretical framework which allow us to study the interaction of locus of class consciousness with the other loci of consciousness formation such as the community and the state. Such an approach is also grounded in the belief that a relational understanding of these processes requires us to take spatial dynamics such as local dependency, spatial fix and fixity and mobility into account. By critically drawing upon historico-geographical materialist approach(es), the thesis attempts at resolving the tensions between &lsquo / locality-wider society&rsquo / and &lsquo / structure-consciousness&rsquo / . By integrating them into a holistic and operational conceptual framework, it investigates the highly complex patterning of relations within urban structured coherences, and their effects upon the class and consciousness formation processes. It is shown that interpenetration of these fields of tension through urban processes is crucial in shaping a backbone for the concrete struggles fought by working class against capital in and of the urban regions. These issues are discussed with reference to two working class neighborhoods in Bursa. The first community, Emek, is an unplanned, illegally built settlement, hosting mostly migrant, and lower-wage earning industrial workers, and the second one, Akpinar, is a planned settlement, composed of low-cost housing cooperatives, symbolizing a higher living standard environment for well-paid, socially secure workers, mostly local in origin. The field research focuses on the relations between &lsquo / the labor market, housing market and local dependency&rsquo / and &lsquo / the strategies between mobility-fixity adopted both on part of capital and labor&rsquo / . The specific character of these strategies also tell us how the patterning of the relations between class, community and state loci of consciousness formation and the formation of local coherences mutually shape one another. It is often assumed in this context that formation of class-based consciousness is hindered by other loci of consciousness such as the community-based one. This study shows that community-based consciousness is itself largely absent in the communities in hand and when community-base is deployed by the local workers it is often strategically employed to get personal benefits. In this sense, the study concludes that the lack of community-based consciousness does not device more effective strategies of formation of class-based consciousness but perhaps another adverse factor in developing class-based consciousness in an environment heavily dominated by individualized form of consciousness.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University. / Title from electronic title page (viewed Aug. 26, 2002). This electronic edition is part of the UNC-CH digitization project's database, Documenting the American South. It is a part of the collection The North Carolina experience, beginnings to 1940. Text scanned (OCR) by Apex Data Services, Inc. Images scanned by Tammy Evans. Text encoded by Apex Data Services, Inc., Melissa Meeks and Natalia Smith. Includes bibliographical references.

Built in 1880, George Pullman's railroad car manufacturing town was intended to be a model of industrial order. This Gilded Age capitalist's ideal image of working class women is reflected in the publicly prescribed place for women in the community and the company's provisions for female employment in the shops. Pullman wanted women to establish the town's domestic tranquility by cultivating a middle class environment, which he believed was a key to keeping the working class content. Throughout the course of the idealized communitarian experiment, however, Pullman's policies and prescriptions changed to meet the needs of working class families who depended on the wages of women. This paper will study the ideologies and realities surrounding women in nineteenth century Pullman.