Making a Living by Chad Montrie

Making a Living by Chad Montrie

This work covers the impact of workers' rights struggles on the environmental movement.In an innovative fusion of labor and environmental history, ""Making a Living"" examines work as a central part of Americans' evolving relationship with nature, revealing the unexpected connections between the fight for workers' rights and the rise of the modern environmental movement.Chad Montrie offers six case studies: textile ""mill girls"" in antebellum New England, plantation slaves and newly freed sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, home-steading women in the Kansas and Nebraska grasslands, native-born coal miners in southern Appalachia, autoworkers in Detroit, and Mexican and Mexican American farm workers in southern California. Montrie shows how increasingly organized and mechanized production drove a wedge between workers and nature - and how workers fought back. Workers' resistance not only addressed wages and conditions, he argues, but also planted the seeds of environmental reform and environmental justice activism. Workers played a critical role in raising popular consciousness, pioneering strategies for enacting environmental regulatory policy, and initiating militant local protest.Filled with poignant and illuminating vignettes, ""Making a Living"" provides new insights into the intersection of the labor movement and environmentalism in America.

Chad Montrie is assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and author of To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia (from the University of North Carolina Press).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780807858783
ISBN 10	0807858781
Title	Making a Living
Author	Chad Montrie
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The University of North Carolina Press
Year published	2008-05-30
Number of pages	192
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.