Working Class History

ABSTRACT
The Jacobean era's infamous witchcraft trials are recalled after reservoir repairs close to Pendle Hill reveal a buried cottage with bricked‐up cat. Interpretations of the building as the site of Malkin Tower, recorded in court records as the venue of a witches coven are critically evaluated in the light of archaeological and historical evidence.

KEYWORDS
WITCH, PENDLE WITCH TRIALS, PENDLE HILL, MALKIN TOWER, FOLK BELIEF, MAGIC, LANCASTER ASSIZES, WISE WOMEN, CUNNING FOLK, ARCHAEOLOGY, HISTORY, SEVENTEENTHCENTURY, ALIZON DEVICE, SALEM WITCHES, THOMAS POTTS, LOWER BLACK MOSS, ELIZABETH SOUTHERNS, DEMDIKE, ELIZABETH DEVICE, JAMES DEVICE, ANNE WHITTLE, CHATTOX, ANNE REDFERNE, JANE BULCOCK, JOHN BULCOCK, ALICE NUTTER, KATHERINE HEWITT, ALICE GRAY, JENNET PRESTON, GUNPOWDER PLOT, CAT

"Le second peuple de Nantes au XVIIIe siècle :
environnements du quotidien et interactions sociales.

Pour les intellectuels et lexicographes officiant sous l’Ancien Régime, le peuple de France n’est alors pas un mais multiple. Au cœur de l’espace urbain, exclusion faite de la population mendiante et vagabonde, la partie tout à la fois la plus nombreuse et la moins bien considérée de ce peuple regroupe les travailleurs journaliers et sans qualification, ceux de la terre ou plus ou moins qualifiés mais non dépendants d’un cadre corporatif, la domesticité au sens large, les ouvriers de manufactures, les compagnons et garçons de métiers jurés ainsi que l’ensemble des chambrelans besognant en contravention aux statuts des jurandes. Cette population que nous identifions sous l’appellation « second peuple » se caractérise par une existence de ses membres majoritairement vécue dans la précarité quotidienne, une insertion plus ou moins bien définie et solide au sein de la société urbaine et une inscription en dehors de toute forme officielle d’organisation horizontale du travail. Une attention portée sur trois pans majeurs de l’existence du second peuple de la ville de Nantes au dernier siècle de la monarchie absolue, soit la vie en communauté, la consommation matérielle et l’activité laborieuse, est en mesure de dévoiler quelques-uns des traits essentiels des individus le constituant : place centrale de l’élément féminin, importance des notions de déplacement et d’implantation géographiques, force des connexions et solidarités de voisinage, rapport parfois houleux à l’autorité et frugalité de l’environnement matériel du quotidien.

Mots clés : peuple, ville, Nantes, inventaire de biens, travail illégal, résistance, solidarité, voisinage, lien social, violence, mouvement, migration, parrainage, pauvreté, précarité, consommation, micro-histoire, déménagement.

The second people of Nantes in the XVIIIth century:
everyday environments and social interactions.

For the intellectuals and lexicographers officiating under the Ancien Regime, the people of France was then not one but many. At the heart of urban space, excluding the population of beggars and vagabonds, the at once most numerous and least well regarded part of this people groups together unqualified day laborers, those working on the land or more or less qualified but not dependent on a corporate framework, domestic workers in the broadest sense of the word, factory workers, journeymen and juniors in the legal profession and all “roomworkers” toiling in contravention of the statutes of the guilds. This population that we identify under the name of the “second people” is characterized by a life of its members mostly lived in everyday poverty, a more or less well defined and strong insertion in the heart of urban society and an entry without any official form of horizontal organization of work. A focus on three major segments of the existence of the second people of the city of Nantes in the last century of absolute monarchy, be it community life, material consumption or work activity, is able to reveal some essential features of the individuals which make it up: the central role of the feminine element, the importance of the concepts of travel and geographic location, the strength of connections and neighborhood solidarity, sometimes stormy relations with authority and the frugality of the material environment of daily life.

Key words: people, city, Nantes, inventories of goods, subterranean work, resistance, solidarity, neighborhood, social tie, violence, movement, migration, spiritual kinship, poverty, precariousness, household consumption, microhistory, move."

“Kan-Suksa Popular Culture Bab Edwar P. Thompson” [Edward P. Thompson and His Study of Popular Culture], in Yukti Mukdawijitra, editor. Wattanadham Tor-Tan [Cultural Resistance]. Bangkok: Princess Maha Jakkri Sirindhorn Anthropology Center. (written in Thai).

W swoim artykule staram się pokazać, jak dwa kluczowe dla współczesności procesy, a więc digitalizacja oraz usieciowienie rzeczywistości, przeobrażają kategorię masy i umasowienia. Te ostatnie zjawiska, traktowane przez nauki społeczne jako symptomy niepokojących zmian społecznych, fenomeny przejściowe o krótkotrwałym charakterze, dziś znacząco zmieniają swoją naturą. Jej identyfikacja została w tekście oparta na prezentacji tego, jak masa ewoluuje od początków Internetu do dzisiaj, przechodząc przez trzy stadia, określone mianem masy 1.0, 2.0 i 3.0. W tym ostatnim, najbardziej współczesnym stadium, pojawia się to, co określam mianem sieciowych mas pracujących. Ich charakterystyka oraz refleksja nad tym, czym różnią się one od klasycznych mas, stanowi ważną część artykułu.

Cet article vise a presenter certains resultats d’une recherche sur la culture solidaire mutualiste au sein des milieux ouvriers quebecois lors de la mise en place de l’economie de marche au milieu du XIXe siecle. A partir de la theorie de l’encastrement de Karl Polanyi, nous montrerons que les milieux ouvriers quebecois ont resiste d’une facon originale aux pressions de l’economie de marche sur la reproduction des rapports sociaux dans le contexte du developpement du capitalisme moderne. Cette resistance s’est incarnee dans de multiples societes ouvrieres de secours mutuel qui ont tente de nourrir une conception differente de l’economie fondee sur la cooperation et la « compassion fraternelle » et non sur la concurrence. Cette reponse a la question sociale a egalement nourri des utopies dans la mesure ou la mutualite a debouche sur le projet d’une communaute ouvriere autonome, democratique et solidaire.

Il saggio è dedicato ad alcune figure professionali del mondo romano legate alla lavorazione e alla vendita dell'oro e di manufatti realizzati con questo metallo prezioso. Nel testo si analizzano in particolare le testimonianze epigrafiche di Roma e quelle di Mutina nel cui territorio, secondo un'antica tradizione popolare, sarebbe stato possibile estrarre masse aurifere.

We learn about the preparation for and voyage to India, for example. There are interesting examples of Company servants’ struggles to maintain health on the way and in the subcontinent. Thomas Cust and his family offer insights here. Cust, a captain in the Bengal Native Infantry, had recently returned from extended sick leave in South Africa when he died at Barrackpore in 1795. Only three years later, his daughter Susan, who had probably contracted tuberculosis in England before returning to Calcutta, was advised to go on a sea voyage for the benefit of her health. Perhaps most significantly, Provincial Society and Empire underscores the value and importance of the complex networks of patronage, kinship and friendship that helped to produce appointments and facilitate Company success in Asia. Here, Cumbria and its communities provide an invaluable case study. For example, Andrew Fleming Hudleston was helped to prepare for his voyage by his second cousin, the retired Company servant and Company director, John Hudleston. A grateful Andrew told his aunt, Isabella, that John was ‘very kind in assisting me in getting all things necessary for my outfit to India’ (122). In the years to come, advances in digitization should – theoretically at least – make this kind of approach even more time-efficient and rewarding. As it stands, Provincial Society and Empire undoubtedly illuminates social conditions in India and in Cumbria, as well as the personal and economic connections between them. It is to be hoped that it will also stimulate further investigation and encourage a more comprehensive overview of the regional impact of the East India Company across the British Isles.

Quirke, Carol. Eyes on Labor: News Photography and America's Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 358 pp. $99.Eyes on Labor is a valuable contribution to the history of journalism, exploring the ways in which imagery has been deployed in reporting, but also by corporate and labor interests, to shape public perceptions of American workers and their struggles. Its origins lie in a study of Life magazine's depiction of the Great Depression, which found that despite its black-and-white palette the depicted an America "closer to the Technicolor Land of Oz than dowdy, dust bowl Kansas." As the quote suggests, this is a well-written, engaging study, and an ambitious one. It encompasses representations of class, of visual language, of the ways even sympathetic portrayal of labor struggles can elide workers' agency.Eyes on Labor examines the representation of labor from the earliest days of visual representation in newspapers and magazines through the 1940s, though the emphasis is on the 1930s and 1940s. Of particular interest is the diversity of Quirke's case studies, including the early days of Life magazine, the Memorial Day Massacre and the Hershey Chocolate Sit-Down Strike, and the sharply contrasting visual representations offered in the Steel Workers' Steel Labor and the rank-and-file photography that dominated Distributive Workers Local 65's publication.Photographs were widely seen as objective representations of reality; indeed Quirke argues that they derive much of their persuasive power from this perception. But it has long been recognized that images are constructed, selected, and displayed to represent the world in particular ways. Even the same photo might be used in a union newspaper to represent workers' activism and strength, or in more commercial media to represent danger-the different interpretations conveyed through captions, cropping, and the context in which the image appears.An opening chapter examines pictorial representations of the 1877 railroad strike, the 1919 strike wave, and the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Photojournalism was in its infancy for much of this period, and it was difficult to capture action. Photographers aimed to "document" working-class life, but from an outsider's perspective. News photography typically depicted strikers as dangerous mobs and workers as diligent, anonymous toilers. But technological improvements made possible more lively imagery, and facilitated the reproduction of photos for mass audiences.The launch of Life magazine in 1936 paralleled the explosion in unionization across American industry. Workers (and especially union leaders) were depicted in Life , but the magazine's pages were increasingly preoccupied with the dangers of social unrest, inevitably seen as the product of workers' activities, rather than those of the employers or police. Hershey chocolate effectively used photographs to promote an idealized image of its company town and labor relations, and to whitewash the use of thugs to break a 1937 sit-down strike. …

Durante décadas o Centro Promotor funcionou como o grande pilar do movimento operário português, estando completamente integrado na sociedade liberal. Neste artigo pretendemos analisar a integração e a rutura do movimento operário na sociedade liberal através o Centro Promotor, entre 1850 a 1873. Uma baliza cronológica caracterizada por um despontar de um movimento operário ordeiro e conciliador com o regime liberal que, mais tarde, vai ser substituído por uma outra geração de socialistas mais radical que provoca a desintegração do movimento operário no regime liberal.

... ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIELDWORK With the help of our fieldschool students, we have completed five years of excavations both at Ludlow and at the CF&1-owned company town of Berwind. ... InBerwind, the streets, foundations, latrines, and trash pits remain visible on the surface. ...

Mid-century Secularism represents an important stage of nineteenth-century freethought – an intervention between the earlier infidelity of Carlile and “Bradlaugh’s rather crude anti-clericism and love of Bible-bashing.” While this new movement inherited much from the earlier infidelity of Carlile and Owen, Holyoake offered an epistemology and morality independent of Christianity, yet supposedly no longer at war with it. Had Holyoake’s Secularism amounted to nothing more than this, it would nevertheless represent a significant historical development. Yet, mid-century Secularism is also significant in terms of the development of modern secularity, as it is now understood.

This essay examines Secularism as developed by George Jacob Holyoake in 1851–1852. While historians have noted the importance of evolutionary thought for freethinking radicals from the 1840s, and others have traced the popularization of agnosticism and Darwinian evolution by later Victorian freethinkers, insufficient attention has been paid to mid-century Secularism as constitutive of the cultural and intellectual environment necessary for the promotion and relative success of scientific naturalism. I argue that Secularism was a significant source for the emerging new creed of scientific naturalism in the mid-nineteenth century. Not only did early Secularism help clear the way by fighting battles with the state and religious interlocutors, but it also served as a source for what Huxley, almost twenty years later, termed ‘agnosticism’. Holyoake modified freethought in the early 1850s, as he forged connections with middle-class literary radicals and budding scientific naturalists, som...

Two former industrial giants on opposite sides of the globe—the well-known and extensively studied city of Detroit (USA) and the lesser-known but regionally important city of Łódź (Poland)—developed in historically differing economic and political circumstances but have much in common. In both cases, postwar prosperity brought the working class to the center of the social imaginary, resulting in the emergence of a corporate welfare state on one side of the Atlantic Ocean and a socialist one on the other. Thus, two “workers’ El Dorados” were based on almost opposite lifestyles, values and models of society, and each lasted for no more than one generation. Changes in industrial structures and locations, the inflexibility of the mono-industrial giants, and a general shift to late capitalism and the post-Fordist mode of production affected both cities. Workers’ biographies were experienced through the primacy of work as a means of individual, social, and state reproduction. Factory work...

Este artículo se propone analizar las batallas obreras acontecidas en la industria de la alimentación en el Gran Rosario luego del “Cordobazo” (mayo de 1969) y de los “Rosariazos” (mayo y setiembre de 1969). Dichas luchas fueron escasamente exploradas por la historiografía hasta el momento desde la perspectiva propuesta. Se articulan transformaciones estructurales, luchas y organización en una escala regional/local sin perder de vista las dinámicas nacionales. Asimismo, se develan los límites y contradicciones del proceso de radicalización social y política en el marco de luchas defensivas, por la conservación de fuentes de trabajo frente a suspensiones, cesantías y cierres. Se utilizan fuentes diversas: entrevistas, prensa periódica, de organizaciones sindicales y políticas, y documentos de servicios de inteligencia.

... ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIELDWORK With the help of our fieldschool students, we have completed five years of excavations both at Ludlow and at the CF&1-owned company town of Berwind. ... InBerwind, the streets, foundations, latrines, and trash pits remain visible on the surface. ...

Il saggio analizza la rappresentazione dei lavoratori in Italia durante la seconda metà del XX secolo, con una particolare attenzione alla loro mascolinità: le due immagini, infatti, quella dell’operaio e quella dell’uomo, sono spesso sovrapposte perché la rappresentazione del lavoratore in quanto uomo nasce dalla convinzione che il lavoro sia ciò che definisce l’essere uomo.
Le due rappresentazioni sono studiate mettendo a confronto le immagini dei luoghi del lavoro e dei lavoratori con le loro autorappresentazioni, attraverso l’analisi di film e fotografie, romanzi e racconti autobiografici.
Il saggio ipotizza che esista una connessione fra la perdita di centralità del lavoro industriale dagli anni ’70 ad oggi e la trasformazione della maschilità nello stesso periodo, sotto l’influenza sia del femminismo che, più in generale, di un cambiamento dei valori sociali. In questo periodo l’identità maschile si ridefinisce: così, essa non è più costruita a partire dal lavoro ma, ad esempio, da una nuova consapevolezza di sé fondata sulla corporeità.

The essay analizes the representation of industrial workers in Italy during the second half of XX century, with a specific interest about their masculinity: in fact this two public images, the man and the industrial worker, are overlapped because the representation of the industrial worker as a man derives from the belief that work is what defines manhood.
Both representations are studied comparing the public images of factories and industrial workers and their self-representation, exploring movies and photograps, novels and autobiografic stories.
The essay supposes a connection between the loss of importance of industrial work from ’70 until now, and the transformation of the manliness in the same period, influenced both from feminism and, more generally, from the change of social values. In this time the male identity is redefined: so it isn’t more built from the work but, for example, from a new self-awareness body-centered.

At the end of the XIXth century, the rhythm of time must have captivated the minds and the actions of most of the economical and political elite of Chile, including the regional ones. Enhancing the one formed in the southern boarder of the Araucania by the German settlers and their descendents. Center of pilgrimage of the developers of work mechanization, long and numerous studies of this period tried to translate in words the admiration and the astonishment that their booming industrial development caused themselves, being so faraway from the country and world center. Nevertheless, under the statistical structure of analysis, the German industrial model was notably far from being a modernization process of the society, as it was presented. In front of the impossibility of studying the entire process, we propose several lines of non-used analysis, the main one: the study of work and its labor market. We emphasize � and try to explain � two traditional labor forms, accepted and endor...

There was once a time in the not too recent past when scholarly discussion and debate over periodization was central to the task of writing and thinking about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Scholars such as Richard Hofstadter, Robert Wiebe, and Samuel P. Hays applied versions of modernization theory to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce what came to be known as the “organizational synthesis.” A competing periodization centered on the rise of the large business corporation appeared in works by Martin Sklar, James Weinstein, and James Livingston. Since the 1970s, however, the new social and cultural history has introduced a multitude of new fields and perspectives. By the 1980s, the perceived fragmentation of history had generated an appeal for “synthesis.” In 1986 Thomas Bender called for new and intelligible narrative plots that would transcend “recent scholarship with its intensive specialization, fragmentation, and preoccupation with groups.” Yet, si...

The article is an attempt to answer the question of how the
working class impacted the shape of the debate about planned urban self-government in the Kingdom of Poland during and after the Revolution of 1905.
Recognizing the fact that the events between 1905 and 1907 were an “urban revolution,” I analyze press articles and books on the subject published at that time. What follows is a detailed description of the impact of the working class on visions of urban modernity and concepts of “municipal socialism” and “national capitalism” which emerged during these debates and dominated urban politics in the Second Polish Republic.

La reforma al Codigo Procesal Laboral en Costa Rica entre 2015 y 2017 permite adentrarse en la forma en que se afrontan las crisis y se construyen los pactos en ese pais. La tesis fundamental de este articulo es que esa reforma responde a un historico estilo politico costarricense que privilegia los pactos intra- einterclasistas y, con eso, la ampliacion de las instituciones democraticas. Se trata de un estilo politico que permite resolver y prevenir crisis sociopoliticas y evitar la radicalizacion.

This article explores the relationship of shame to class and to desire in Michelle Tea's memoir The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America. Through applying a class analytic to the framework of shame recently advanced by feminist, queer, postcolonial, and affect theorists, I foreground shame as central to the experience of being poor and queer, and examine shame as not only negative and positive, but as productive. I operationalize an “oppositional reading strategy” to insist on attention to the materiality of embodied desire and labor, in particular queer desire and sex work, that is made available in poor and working‐class women's life‐writing. Tea's memoir demonstrates how writing about an ambivalent relation to shame is an act of resistance, an opportunity to transform private, individual experiences into public, and therefore collective, articulations.

En se fondant sur des recherches originales menées en France et au Québec (Canada), ainsi que sur des sources secondaires sur trois pays (Italie, Etats-Unis, Japon), cet article propose un panorama de l'affirmation d'une conception ouvrière des enjeux environnementaux dans les années 60 et 70. L'article revient à la fois sur les mutations idéologiques des organisations ouvrières qui prennent en charge la question environnementale, ainsi que sur les transformations des structures et du répertoire d'action des organisations concernées.

The growing field of working-class studies provides a valuable narrative of the experiences of working-class academics, illustrates commonalities among such experiences and provides a space for dismantling the structural class-based disenfranchisement which proves detrimental to working-class scholars' careers. Recent articles in The Journal of Working-class Studies have identified and named the specific experiences of alienation faced by working-class scholars, which include issues of financial disenfranchisement, issues of taste, accent, and 'respectability' (Attfield 2016), issues of 'passing', the imposter syndrome, and feelings of class betrayal (Warnock 2016). However, as Nicola Wilson (2016) and others have noted, 'working-class is a fluid category and grouping'. For many scholars living in or emerging from a background of poverty, the term 'working-class' is limited. The term 'welfare-class' more appropriately describes the experie...

Representing labour Class is about the representation, linguistically, of a socio-economic phenomenon. In the Anglophone world the exact relationship between these terms vexed analysis of class in the last third of the twentieth century. Class, as the prefatory quotes above make clear, is also, however, about the politics of representation. This capacity of linguistic representation is, therefore, about cultural, political economy and, according to Scott, the ‘power to define reality itself’. In the following chapter I explicate some elements of the historical process by which knowledge was produced about class in Ireland. I contend that labour, the political and cultural expression(s) of the ‘subaltern classes’, has been represented in both urban and rural forms during the past 400 years. The first section charts some aspects of the emergence of the representation of labour in Ireland, 1603-1824, which is, in a broad sense, the age of manufacture, as Marx described it, or ‘proto-in...

This article examines the popular mobilization against high prices in Greece during World War I and Greco-Turkish war, and the legislation against profiteering which was adopted in the context of the rising state intervention in the economy. It focuses on the workers’ action, which has been argued that was informed by perceptions of moral economy. I argue that we should keep a narrow definition of moral economy, in which necessary is the presence of views that are based on customary practices of market regulations. This is not our case: the Greek discourse about “shameful profit” was not the product of the meeting of a traditional society with the capitalist market, as indicates the important role played in its development by the educated lower middle class. I attempt to interpret it in terms of a combination of traditional representations of the merchant, its dialectic relationship with the emerging statism, as well as strategies of the young labor movement towards workers’ unification and widening of its appeal to popular strata.

Los terminos historiograficos «mentalidad» y «cultura» corren el peligro de convertirse en palabras vacias de significado por la profusion de uso y la constante indefinicion que padecen. Para contrarrestar esto, se efectua la defensa teorica de ambos conceptos hecha desde una interdisciplinaridad metodologica y desde la asuncion de sus propios limites. Tras la ubicacion del tema entre la corriente de estudios historicos sobre los obreros y los movimientos obreros en la Espana de entresiglos, los autores plantean tanto una distincion como una definicion de cada una de las areas propuestas, finalizando con una sugerencia de lineas tematicas de investigacion que recogen lo que ya esta efectuado -a modo de un «estado de la cuestion»- y lo que aun queda por hacer en este sentido abarcando tres grandes aspectos: las necesidades y condiciones de vida obrera, el lenguaje y los mecanismos de expresion obrera y la etica y el comportamiento obrero.

Although women constituted a significant part of the total labour force in the mines of India, yet till the end of the First World War very little was done to promote their health and welfare. In the absence of welfare legislation and voluntary work, women faced serious hardship and privation especially during the period of their confinement. Not only were they not paid any wages for the period of their absence, in some cases they lost their jobs and incurred heavy debts to defray the expenses of this critical period of their lives. The International Labour Organisation, founded at the end of World War I to secure and maintain fair and humane conditions for labour, in their very first conference held at Washington in 1919 recommended to its member states, including India, the necessity of providing adequate maternity benefit to their female labour employed in the industrial establishments. The main provisions of the draft convention (stipulated in articles 3 and 4) were: (a) rest periods of six weeks before and after confinement; (b) sufficient maintenance for the mother and child including the provision of free attendance by a doctor or a midwife; (c) an allowance of half-an-hour twice daily for nursing the child; and (d) security against dismissal on account of absence due to confinement. Ever since the adoption of this convention at Washington, the question of maternity benefit had become a subject of debate and discussion in India both inside and outside the legislature.

As it is not possible to study in detail all aspects of the issue in such a short paper, we intend to limit ourselves to certain aspects of it. Section I examines the working of voluntary maternity benefit schemes in the British Indian mines. Section II deals with the enactment of the Indian Mines Maternity Benefit Act, 1941, which was put in the statute book 'to regulate the employment of women in mines for a certain period before and after childbirth and to provide for payment of maternity benefit to them'. It also critically examines the main provisions of the Act. Section III is a study of the working of the Act.