False Promises

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Desmond Morton

"In this expanded and updated classic, Desmond Morton explores the history of the Canadian labour movement and brings the story to the present day with a discussion of globalization and its impact on workers. Working People examines the clash between the idealists, who fought for such "impossible" dreams as the eight-hour day, paid holidays, industrial democracy, and equality for woman, and the realists, who wrestled with the human realities of self-interest, prejudice, and fear. It focuses on workers - from 19th-century dock workers to teenage "crews" at McDonald's today - and documents their struggle for dignity and security in a constantly changing world."--BOOK JACKET.

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Kenneth M. Straus

Straus argues that the keys for interpreting Stalinism lie in occupational specialization, on the one hand, and community organization, on the other. He focuses on the daily life (byt) of the new Soviet workers in the factory and community, arguing that the most significant new trends saw peasants becoming open hearth steel workers, housewives becoming auto assembly line workers and machine operatives, and youth training en masse rather than in individualized apprenticeships for all types of occupations categories in the vocational schools in the factories, the FZU. Tapping archival material only recently available and a wealth of published sources, Straus presents Soviet social history within a new analytical framework, suggesting that Stalinist forced industrialization and Soviet proletarianization is best understood within a comparative European framework, in which the theories of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber best elucidate both the broad similarities with Western trends and the striking exceptional aspects of the Soviet experience.

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K.S. Singh, Birendranath Datta

Papers presented at a seminar organized by Anthropological Survey of India in collaboration with the Department of Folklore Research, Gawahati University with special reference to North-east India.

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A.T. Van Deursen

This is an account of the ordinary working people of Holland in the seventeenth-century, the so-called 'golden age'. Professor van Deursen is the most outstanding and gifted scholar at present working on this period of Dutch history. His history 'from below' is based on a mass of contemporary documentary evidence and the text is enlivened by contemporary illustrations. Ranging over a broad spectrum of everyday conditions, sex, marriage, leisure, religion and popular culture, this is the most comprehensive study yet published of the plain lives of a 'golden age'.