English Working Class

During the formative years of the Industrial Revolution, English workers and artisans claimed a place in society that would shape the following centuries. But the capitalist elite did not form the working class - the workers shaped their own creations, developing a shared identity in the process. Despite their lack of power and the indignity forced upon them by the upper classes, the working class emerged as England's greatest cultural and political force.

When Ishmael takes a crew of academy cadets into the Toe Holds, he's unprepared for the level of trouble green hands can get into. Meanwhile, their academy liaison discovers what can go wrong when you learn the wrong lessons and try to teach the wrong students. Will they all make it back to the academy before somebody accidentally takes a short walk out the airlock without a suit?

Powered by original field research and survey analysis in the US and UK, The White Working Class: What Everyone Needs to Know provides a comprehensive and accessible exploration of white working-class politics and the populism that is transforming the transatlantic social and political landscape. 

The story of a disillusioned generation that set out to reclaim its dignity and take on corporate America. This program is read by award-winning narrator André Santana. “André Santana's performance succinctly conveys the spirit of this audiobook about modern-day organizing and unionizing.”...

There have been countless books, articles, and televised reports in recent years about the almost mythic "white working class," a tide of commentary that has obscured the labor, and even the very existence, of entire groups of working people, including everyday Black workers. In this brilliant corrective, Black Folk, acclaimed historian Blair LM Kelley restores the Black working class to the center of the American story.

'You’ve never really made it in fashion. Nobody cares how good you used to be. It’s about today and tomorrow.' Describing his journey from leaving school at fifteen with undiagnosed dyslexia to his life changing accident that would end his dream of becoming a racing cyclist, Sir Paul’s...

Bess Hartley crafts haunting Victorian romances where courage, hardship, and slow-burning love collide beneath the smoke and shadows of nineteenth-century England. In the smoke-blackened streets of Victorian Manchester, survival is never freely given. Essie Breward was only seven years old when her father sold her and her brother into the brutal world of the chimney sweep’s yard. While her brother Joss climbed deadly flues thick with soot, Essie scrubbed pots in silence—until the day Joss never came home. The master sweep called it an accident. Essie heard the truth. Fleeing into the ...

Long before Cold Chisel and Barnesy, long before the success and excess, there was the true story of James Dixon Swan - a working-class boy whose family made the journey from Scotland to Australia in search of a better life. Working Class Boy is a powerful reflection on a traumatic and violent childhood, which fuelled the excess and recklessness that would define, but almost destroy, the rock’n’roll legend. This is the story of how James Swan became Jimmy Barnes.

From the prophetic author of the now-classic What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal, an eye-opening account of populism, the most important—and misunderstood—movement of our time. Rarely does a work of history contain startling implications for the present, but in The People...

In Second Class, working-class Americans of all races, political orientations, and occupations share their stories—cleaning ladies, health care aides, cops, truck drivers, fast food workers, electricians, and more. In their own words, these working-class Americans explain the struggles and triumphs of their increasingly precarious lives—as well as what policies they think would improve them.

This remarkable account has had an enduring influence on social and economic studies and has remained in print since its first English publication in 1885. It was written, in German, by a youthful Friedrich Engels, the son of a German industrialist, who was already concerned - even angered - by the conditions he saw inflicted on the working classes as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum. His first visit to England (1842-44) and what he saw there with his own eyes fuelled his concerns and prompted him to make this formal study.

She built a perfect fortress to keep the world out. Then she hired the one woman who could make her want more. She built a perfect fortress to keep the world out. Then she hired the one woman who could make her want more. After a very public divorce, Elizabeth Chandler has rebuilt her life around control: a flawless Bel Air estate, immaculate drought-proof gardens, and rules no one is allowed to break. Chloe Hayes is the botany student she hires to maintain it—and the last woman Elizabeth should want anywhere near the walls she’s spent years building. Chloe only needs the job long ...

As London burns, the Morrows fight to hold on to love, loyalty and the last pieces of their world. A powerful five‑book saga of survival, secrets and the unbreakable bonds of family. In 1939, the Morrows of Newgate Street live in the shadow of the Old Bailey, a working‑class family full of loud voices, fierce loyalties and buried grudges. As Europe edges toward war, their own street simmers with forbidden love, violent tempers, long‑held resentments and a murder that will change everything. The world is on the brink of upheaval — and so are they. By 1940, London is burning and the ...

Friedrich Engels spent two years (from 1842 to 1844) in Manchester, England, working at his father's factory. During that period he observed and recorded the effect of the industrial revolution on the labor market and the subsequent condition of what became the working class of England.

The job was a favor. The complications were not in the fine print. Russ has spent years keeping his daughter Miri safe on the Rim—or at least, his version of safe. When he agrees to a simple retrieval job for a pair of eccentric elderly sisters, he figures it's easy money. Wrong mine shaft. Wrong intel. Very wrong creatures with too many teeth. Now he's stuck in a collapsing death trap with a cargo that's either worthless junk or their ticket off the Rim for good, and Miri's running calculations on their survival odds that he really doesn't want to hear. The smart move is to cut their ...

A wide-ranging cultural and political history that will forever redefine a misunderstood decade, Stayin' Alive is prize-winning historian Jefferson Cowie's remarkable account of how working-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s. In this edgy and incisive book, Cowie, with "an ear for the power and poetry of vernacular speech" (Cleveland Plain Dealer), reveals America's fascinating path from rising incomes and optimism of the New Deal to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present.

Love and the Working Class is a unique look at the emotions of hard-living, nineteenth-century Americans who were often on the cusp of literacy. These laboring folk highly valued letters and, however difficult it was, wrote to stay connected to those they loved. This book displays the personal expression of factory hands, manual laborers, peddlers, coopers, carpenters, lumbermen, miners, tanners, haulers, tailors, seamstresses, laundresses, domestics, sharecroppers, independent farmers, and common soldiers and their wives.

July 4, 1967. A chaplain gave him a notebook. He did not ask for it. He was a mechanic from Michigan and he had nothing to write. The chaplain said write to yourself. So he wrote to himself. He wrote in the monsoon and he wrote in the dry season and he wrote on the wire at night when the treeline was dark and the dark was the thing you watched. He wrote after the first man he knew was killed and he wrote after the village burned and he wrote after Hue when there was nothing left to write and he wrote anyway. The notebook held the things his hands could not. Danny Kovalchik is nineteen. He ...

This program is read by the author. Laurie Gelman’s clever debut about a year in the life of a kindergarten class mom—a brilliant send-up of the petty and surprisingly cutthroat terrain of parent politics. Jen Dixon is not your typical Kansas City kindergarten class mom—or mom in general...

Around the world, populist movements are gaining traction among the white working class. Meanwhile, members of the professional elite - journalists, managers, and establishment politicians - are on the outside looking in, left to argue over the reasons. Williams explains that many people have conflated "working class" with "poor" - but the working class is, in fact, the elusive, purportedly disappearing middle class. They often resent the poor and the professionals alike. But they don't resent the truly rich.