John Russo

Sherry Lee Linkon

Once the symbol of a robust steel industry and blue-collar economy, Youngstown, Ohio, and its famous Jeannette Blast Furnace have become key icons in the tragic tale of American deindustrialization. Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo examine the inevitable tension between those discordant visions, which continue to exert great power over Steeltown's citizens as they struggle to redefine their lives. When the Jenny was shut down in 1978, 50,000 Youngstown workers lost their jobs, cutting the heart out of the local economy. Even as the community organized a nationally recognized effort to save the mills, the city was rocked by economic devastation, runaway crime, and mob scandal, problems that persist twenty-five years later. In the midst of these struggles the Jenny remained standing as a proud symbol of the community's glory days, still a dominant force in the construction of both individual and collective identities in Youngstown. Focusing on stories and images that both reflect and perpetuate how Youngstown understands itself as a community, Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo have forged a historical and cultural study of the relationship between community, memory, work, and confli

Work and Memory in Youngstown

Steeltown U.S.A

This book brings together historians, economists, geographers, sociologists, and scholars of literature and cultural studies to explore the emerging discipline of working-class studies and identify its key themes and issues.

New Working-class Studies

A Study in Fiction and Ideology

Rose Terry Cooke and the Woman Question

Since the 1970s, working-class individuals have made up an increasing proportion of students enrolled in institutions of higher education. At the same time, working-class studies has emerged as an academic discipline, updating a long tradition of scholarship on labour history and proletarian literature to include discussions of working-class culture, intersections of class with ethnicity, and studies of the representation of the working class in popular culture. These developments have generated ideas about teaching that incorporate both a sensitivity to the working-class roots of many students and the inclusion of course content informed by an awareness of class culture.

Teaching Working Class

Bill Mullen

Sherry Linkon

'Many of the essays in this volume are brilliant, and all reveal the richness of the 1930s as a subject for renewed study. The diverse critical approaches in Radical Revisions add substantially to the growing body of work on depression-era U.S. culture. Given the increasingly haunting similarities between the 1930s and the 1990s, this book should spark interest in both academic and general reader.'

Rereading 1930s Culture

Radical Revisions

"We put the working class, in all its varieties, at the center of our work. The new working-class studies is not only about the labor movement, or about workers of any particular kind, or workers in any particular place—even in the workplace. Instead, we ask questions about how class works for people at work, at home, and in the community. We explore how class both unites and divides working-class people, which highlights the importance of understanding how class shapes and is shaped by race, gender, ethnicity, and place. We reflect on the common interests as well as the divisions between the most commonly imagined version of the working class—industrial, blue-collar workers—and workers in the 'new economy' whose work and personal lives seem, at first glance, to place them solidly in the middle class."—from the Introduction In John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon's book, contributors trace the origins of the new working-class studies, explore how it is being developed both within and across fields, and identify key themes and issues. Historians, economists, geographers, sociologists, and scholars of literature and cultural studies introduce many and varied aspects of this emerging field. Throughout, they consider how the study of working-class life transforms traditional disciplines and stress the importance of popular and artistic representations of working-class life.

Sherry Lee Linkon

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