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At the beginning of World War II, the United States and Mexico launched the bracero program, a series of labor agreements that brought Mexican men to work temporarily in U.S. agricultural fields. This book asks why these temporary migrants provoked so much concern and anxiety in the United States and what the Mexican government expected to gain in participating in the program. It reveals the fashioning of a U.S.–Mexican transnational world, a world created through the interactions, negotiations, and struggles of the program's principal protagonists including Mexican and U.S. state actors, labor activists, growers, and bracero migrants. The book argues that braceros became racialized foreigners, Mexican citizens, workers, and transnational subjects as they moved between U.S. and Mexican national spaces. Drawing on oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, and documentary evidence, it links the often unconnected themes of exploitation, development, the rise of consumer cultures, and gendered class and race formation to show why those with connections beyond the nation have historically provoked suspicion, anxiety, and retaliatory political policies.

Between the Great War and Pearl Harbor, conservative labor leaders declared themselves America's “first line of defense” against Communism. This account shows how the American Federation of Labor (AFL) fanned popular anticommunism but defended Communists' civil liberties in the aftermath of the 1919 Red Scare. The AFL's “commonsense anticommunism,” it argues, steered a middle course between the American Legion and the American Civil Liberties Union, helping to check campaigns for federal sedition laws. But in the 1930s, frustration with the New Deal order led labor conservatives to redbait the Roosevelt administration and liberal unionists, and abandon their reluctant civil libertarianism for red scare politics. That frustration contributed to the legal architecture of federal anticommunism that culminated with the McCarthyist fervor of the 1950s. Relying on untapped archival sources, the author reveals how labor conservatives and the emerging civil liberties movement debated the proper role of the state in policing radicals and grappled with the challenges to the existing political order posed by Communist organizers. Surprising conclusions about familiar figures, such as J. Edgar Hoover, and unfamiliar episodes, like a German plot to disrupt American munitions manufacture, make her story a fresh retelling of the interwar years.

Home economics emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as a movement to train women to be more efficient household managers. At the same moment, American families began to consume many more goods and services than they produced. To guide women in this transition, professional home economists had two major goals: to teach women to assume their new roles as modern consumers and to communicate homemakers' needs to manufacturers and political leaders. This book charts the development of the profession from its origins as an educational movement to its identity as a source of consumer expertise in the interwar period to its virtual disappearance by the 1970s. Working for both business and government, home economists walked a fine line between educating and representing consumers while they shaped cultural expectations about consumer goods as well as the goods themselves. The author looks beyond 1970s feminist scholarship that dismissed home economics for its emphasis on domesticity to reveal the movement's complexities, including the extent of its public impact and debates about home economists' relationship to the commercial marketplace.

This book consolidates, refines, advances and grounds recent scholarship that challenges familiar platitudes about family farming and rural life in the United States. Its approach yields a depth of information about farming culture not usually found in the literature on rural America. The book takes the reader on a cultural tour of a cherished American institution and landscape: midwestern farm families and their farms. With attention to detail and knowledge borne of first-hand study over many years, the author reveals the pervasive imprint of ethnicity. The book represents one of those rare studies that enrich our social vision and understanding in extraordinary ways. It contributes to the study of agriculture and culture, and its cross-disciplinary approach will engage scholars in many areas. For historians, it is an illustration that different behaviors between American and immigrant farmers, planted over a century ago in the Middle West, have endured to the present.

In this media history of the Caribbean, Alejandra Bronfman traces how technology, culture, and politics developed in a region that was "wired" earlier and more widely than many other parts of the Americas. Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica acquired radio and broadcasting in the early stages of the global expansion of telecommunications technologies. Imperial histories helped forge these material connections through which the United States, Great Britain, and the islands created a virtual laboratory for experiments in audiopolitics and listening practices. As radio became an established medium worldwide, it burgeoned in the Caribbean because the region was a hub for intense foreign and domestic commercial and military activities. Attending to everyday life, infrastructure, and sounded histories during the waxing of an American empire and the waning of British influence in the Caribbean, Bronfman does not allow the notion of empire to stand solely for domination. By the time of the Cold War, broadcasting had become a ubiquitous phenomenon that rendered sound and voice central to political mobilization in the Caribbean nations throwing off what remained of their imperial tethers.

As the main artery of international commerce, merchant shipping was the world's first globalized industry, often serving as a vanguard for issues touching on labor recruiting, the employment relationship, and regulatory enforcement that crossed national borders. This book examines the evolution of laws and labor relations governing ordinary seamen over the past two centuries. The merchant marine offers an ideal setting for examining the changing regulatory regimes applied to workers by the United States, Great Britain, and, ultimately, an organized world community. The book explores both how political and economic ends are reflected in maritime labor regulations and how agents of reform—including governments, trade unions, and global standard-setting authorities—grappled with the problems of applying land-based, national principles and regulations of labor discipline and management to the sea-going labor force. With the rise of powerful nation-states in a global marketplace in the nineteenth century, recruitment and regulation of a mercantile labor force emerged as a high priority and as a vexing problem for Western powers. The history of exploitation, reform, and the evolving international governance of sea labor offers a compelling precedent in an age of more universal globalization of production and services.

In the last half-century, North Carolina and the South have experienced rapid economic growth. Much of the best analysis of this progress came from two North Carolina-based research organizations: the Southern Growth Policies Board and MDC (originally a project of the North Carolina Fund). Their 1986 reports are two of the best assessments of the achievements and limitations of the so-called Sunbelt boom. On November 17, 2011, the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Institute for Emerging Issues at North Carolina State University co-hosted a public discussion to build on these classic reports and to offer fresh analyses of the current challenges facing the region. This book, which issued from this effort, features more than thirty original essays containing recommendations and strategies for building and sustaining a globally competitive South.

In 1890, more than 100,000 Welsh-born immigrants resided in the United States. A majority of them were skilled laborers from the coal mines of Wales who had been recruited by American mining companies. Readily accepted by American society, Welsh immigrants experienced a unique process of acculturation. This history of this exceptional community explores how Welsh immigrants made a significant contribution to the development of the American coal industry, and how their rapid and successful assimilation affected Welsh American culture. The book describes how Welsh immigrants brought their national churches, fraternal orders and societies, love of literature and music, and, most important, their own language. Yet unlike eastern and southern Europeans and the Irish, the Welsh—even with their “foreign” ways—encountered no apparent hostility from the Americans. Often within a single generation, Welsh cultural institutions would begin to fade and a new “Welsh American” identity developed. True to the perspective of the Welsh themselves, the book's analysis adopts a transnational view of immigration, examining the maintenance of Welsh coal-mining culture in the United States and in Wales.