Author: David Bates File Type: pdf Between 1910 and 1920, the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL) inaugurated a massive organizing drive in the citys meatpacking and steel industries. Although the CFL sought legitimately progressive goals, worked earnestly to organize an interracial union, and made major inroads among both black and white workers, their efforts resulted in a bitter defeat. David Bates provides a clear picture of how even the most progressive of intentions can be ground to a halt. By organizing workers into neighborhood locals, which connected workplace struggles to ethnic and religious identities, the CFL facilitated a surge in the organizations membership, particularly among African American workers, and afforded the federation the opportunity to aggressively confront employers. The CFLs innovative structure, however, was ultimately its demise. Linking union locals to neighborhoods proved to be a form of de facto segregation. Over time union structures, rank-and-file conflicts, and employer resistance combined to turn the unions hopeful calls for solidarity into animosity and estrangement. Tensions were exacerbated by violent shop floor confrontations and exploded in the bloody 1919 Chicago Race Riot. By the early 1920s, the CFL had collapsed. The Ordeal of the Jungle explores the choices of a variety of people while showing a complex, overarching interplay of black and white workers and their employers. In addition to analyzing union structures and on-the-ground relations between workers, Bates synthesizes and challenges previous scholarship on interracial organizing to explain the failure of progressive unionism in Chicago. **Review The Ordeal of the Jungle is a timely contribution to the ongoing conversation between the past and the present not only in the fields of labor and African American history but also in movements for the advancement of working people and people of color.Peter Rachleff,author of Black Labor in Richmond, 18651890 In this absorbing study, David Bates charts the spectacular rise and equally dramatic fall of the Chicago Federation of Labors World War I era campaign to organize the citys stockyards across lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and skill.Paul Michel Taillon, author of Good, Reliable, White Men Railroad Brotherhoods, 18771917 The Ordeal of the Jungle deftly blends perspectives of union leaders, rank-and-file workers, strikebreakers, and employers to show how aspects of class and race determined the fate of ambitious organizing drives in Chicagos stockyards and steel mills. Batess methodology and nuanced interpretation exemplify the promise of a new generation of labor historians.Michael K. Rosenow, author of Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865 1920 Bates offers a vivid account of the Chicago labor movements failed attempts to promote a progressive brand of interracial unionism early in the twentieth century. Through a masterful synthesis of the old and new labor histories, Bates illuminates how employer predation, union miscues, and rank-and-file conflict worked together to undercut solidarity and with it hopes of racial change and economic justice. A vital retelling with important lessons for both historians and labororganizers.Kerry Pimblott, author of Faith in Black Power Race, Religion, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois About the Author David Bates is an assistant professor of history at Concordia University Chicago. He is a regular contributor to the Illinois Reading Council Journal and has also contributed to the Journal of Interdisciplinary History and The Encyclopedia of American Reform Movements.

Author: Robert J. Braidwood File Type: pdf This is the story of the first three field campaigns of an archeological expedition-the Iraq-Jarmo Progect-in the Kurdish hill country of Iraq. The volume under review deals with the aims, methods, preliminary results and problems of three campaigns in Iraqi Kurdistan (1948, 1950-51, 1954-55). It does not offer a final excavation or exploration report, since some of the materials have not yet been studied in detail but it contains a valuable series of essays about special aspects of the project which was undertaken as a first major attempt to identify the earliest village-materials and their immediate predecessors. The archaeological and general chapters to the book are the work of R. J. Braidwood and Bruce Howe. They explain the scene and progress of the field-work they give a survey of the sites excavated and the materials collected (chapters I-V). The middle part of the book consists of contributions by the scientists who took an essential part in the field research F. R. Matson writes on ceramic analysis and carbon 14 dating H. E. Wright Jr. on climate and prehistoric man in the Eastern Mediterranean (a comparative study concerned with the entire Levant) H. Helbaek on the palaeo-ethnobotany of the Near East and Europe (an excellent chapter, most informative for the archaeologist in search of specific statements and analyses of early agricultural materials) and Charles A. Reed on animal domestication in the prehistoric Near East (again very instructive, often with an element of reproach directed to field archaeologists who neglected to recognize or salvage zoological evidence in their excavations). The concluding chapters review the results in a more general setting so far as they can be defined in chronological, environmental and general cultural terms and periods. [From a review by Machteld J. Mellink in the American Journal of Archaeology 65 (1961) 195-96]. **