Browsing by Subject "Labor history"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    ‘I Hear That God Saith Work’: Mortality and Labor in Massachusetts, 1619-1690
    (2023-02) Pawlicki, Sarah
    “‘I Hear That God Saith Work’: Mortality and Labor in Massachusetts, 1619-1690” asks how labor practices were structured, challenged, and transformed by religious beliefs about death on the eastern Atlantic seaboard throughout the seventeenth century. It argues that metaphysical beliefs about death and afterlives had significant, tangible effects on the labor performed by Ninnimissinuok and colonizing English communities alike. This project brings religious histories and labor histories – subjects too often treated as discrete entities in past scholarship focused on early American history – into conversation. This dissertation takes an expansive view of labor, including agricultural, educational, reproductive, manual, and domestic labor alike under its purview. It additionally intervenes in the field of labor history by analyzing aspects of seventeenth century Ninnimissinuok and English religious practice as equivalent forms of labor, positing the category of religious labor as a distinct form of work that merits inclusion in labor and religious histories alike. Synthesizing methodologies and analytic lenses derived from Indigenous studies, queer studies, and disability studies, “‘I Hear That God Saith Work’” strives to imaginatively and creatively reconstruct the ways in which religion and labor were intertwined conceptual categories in seventeenth century Massachusetts. Examining the labor histories embedded in religious histories illuminates how religious beliefs continue to define assumptions about what constitutes productive, sanctioned labor today.
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    Interview with Hyman Berman
    (University of Minnesota, 1984-09-22) Berman, Hyman; Chambers, Clarke A.
    Clarke A. Chambers interviews Hyman Berman, member of the Department of History. Berman speaks about his work at the University of Minnesota and his work related to labor history.
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    On our own: flight attendant labor and the family values economy.
    (2010-12) Murphy, Ryan Patrick
    This dissertation historically analyzes the working lives and activism of flight attendants in the U.S. airline industry since 1970. During that period, I trace the emergence of what I call the "family values economy." Given three decades of neoliberal reforms, working people have been less able to count on living-wage jobs or on the state for material support. Traditional family relationships have had to make up for such austerity, with fathers, mothers, and children turning the household into a space to pool the resources of multiple low-paying service jobs. Since flight attendants' work schedules keep them away from home for weeks at a time, and because of involvement in feminist and LGBT movements long critical of "family values" agendas, I argue that flight attendants are uniquely positioned to challenge the reorganization of the economy around traditional family. Flight attendants have thus demanded and won new resources for the alternative arrangements in which they live: as single people, as unmarried parents, as same-sex couples, and as cohabitating friends. The dissertation therefore contributes to labor, gender, and sexuality studies by showing how politicizing family has sustained flight attendants' vigorous push to contest economic inequality.