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The Good Hand : A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown
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ISBN: 1984881523 Year: 2022 Publisher: New York, NY : Penguin Random House LLC,

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"A vivid window into the world of working class men and the value of hard labor, set during the Bakken fracking boom in North Dakota Shiftless and unsatisfied in his life, Michael Patrick Smith decided in his mid-thirties to seek out the hardest work he could find, to see if he could do it. He wanted to be a person, unlike his father, who knew how to work and get things done. He found himself in the oil fields of North Dakota during the Bakken fracking boom of 2013, where he spent a year as a swamper, assisting the truck drivers who hauled oil rigs from one site to another. The Good Hand is a saga of fear, danger, exhaustion, suffering, loneliness, and grit that explores the struggles and rewards of one of the most difficult jobs on the planet. In doing so, the story delves into the internal struggles of people who seem naturally drawn to hard work and hard luck--the rough-hewn, castoff, disposable men who populate boomtowns. As an oil field greenhorn, Smith finds the job is a continual battle; men are mocked and clobbered by equipment. But he comes to love the intensity and camaraderie, forming close bonds with a number of fellow workers, including Huck, an aw-shucks friendly young giant of a man who is constantly getting into trouble with the law, and "The Wildebeest," a truck driver in his fifties who initially torments Smith but later becomes instrumental in helping him to become "a good hand." Smith also examines his troubled relationship with his father--a trait that most of his coworkers seem to share--and draws fascinating parallels between his labor as an oil field hand and his previous careers in theatre and folk music. The Good Hand is ultimately a book about transformation--a classic American story about submitting to something elemental and larger than oneself. Smith discovers that the communities forged by hard work can awaken both the heart and the hands"--


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Fatherhood and the British working class, 1865-1914
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ISBN: 1316255999 1316237079 1316254097 1316250318 1316252205 1316235181 1316248429 1316027058 1107084873 1107446864 Year: 2015 Publisher: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,

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A pioneering study of Victorian and Edwardian fatherhood, investigating what being, and having, a father meant to working-class people. Based on working-class autobiography, the book challenges dominant assumptions about absent or 'feckless' fathers, and reintegrates the paternal figure within the emotional life of families. Locating autobiography within broader social and cultural commentary, Julie-Marie Strange considers material culture, everyday practice, obligation, duty and comedy as sites for the development and expression of complex emotional lives. Emphasising the importance of separating men as husbands from men as fathers, Strange explores how emotional ties were formed between fathers and their children, the models of fatherhood available to working-class men, and the ways in which fathers interacted with children inside and outside the home. She explodes the myth that working-class interiorities are inaccessible or unrecoverable, and locates life stories in the context of other sources, including social surveys, visual culture and popular fiction.

Working Construction
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ISBN: 1501729292 9781501729294 0801444675 0801472865 9780801444678 9780801472862 Year: 2018 Publisher: Ithaca, NY

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Kris Paap worked for nearly three years as a carpenter's apprentice on a variety of jobsites, closely observing her colleagues' habits, expressions, and attitudes. As a woman in an overwhelmingly male-and stereotypically "macho"-profession, Paap uses her experiences to reveal the ways that gender, class, and race interact in the construction industry. She shows how the stereotypes of construction workers and their overt displays of sexism, racism, physical strength, and homophobia are not "just how they are," but rather culturally and structurally mandated enactments of what it means to be a man-and a worker-in America.The significance of these worker performances is particularly clear in relation to occupational safety: when the pressures for demonstrating physical masculinity are combined with a lack of protection from firing, workers are forced to ignore safety procedures in order to prove-whether male or female-that they are "man enough" to do the job. Thus these mandated performances have real, and sometimes deadly, consequences for individuals, the entire working class, and the strength of the union movement.Paap concludes that machismo separates the white male construction workers from their natural political allies, increases their risks on the job, plays to management's interests, lowers their overall social status, and undercuts the effectiveness of their union.


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Chasing Ghosts
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ISBN: 0823268748 9780823268740 9780823268733 082326873X 9780823268849 0823268845 9780823268719 0823268713 Year: 2015 Publisher: New York, NY

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"When literary biographer and memoirist Louise DeSalvo embarked upon a journey to learn why her father came home from World War II a changed man, she didn't realize her quest would take ten years, and that it would yield more revelations about the man--and herself--and the effect of his military service upon their family than she'd ever imagined. During his last years, as he told her about his life, DeSalvo began to understand that her obsession with war novels and military history wasn't merely academic but rooted in her desire to understand this complex father whom she both adored and reviled because of his mistreatment of her. Although she at first believes she wants to uncover his story, the story of a man who was no hero but who was nonetheless adversely affected by his military service, she learns that what she really wants is to recover the man that he was before he went away. As DeSalvo and her father uncover his past piece-by-piece, bit-by-bit, she learns about the dreams of a working-class man who entered the military in the late 1930's during peacetime to better himself, a man who wanted to become a pilot. She learns about what it was like for him to participate in war games in the Pacific prior to the war, and its devastating toll. She learns about what it was like for her parents to fall in love, set up house, marry, and have children during this cataclysmic time. And as the pieces of her father's life fall into place as works to piece together the puzzle of everything she's learned about this time, she finds herself finally able to understand him. Chasing Ghosts is an original contribution to the understanding of working-class World War II veterans who did not conventionally distinguish themselves through 'heroic' actions and whose lives were not until recently considered worthy of historical or cultural attention. It personalizes the history of those sailors who served in the Navy aboard aircraft carriers and on islands in the Pacific prior to, and during World War II and contributes to the current vital conversation about the often-unrecognized effects of war and its traumas upon those men and their families. It reveals the lifelong devastating consequences of military service on those men and women who fell in love, married, and set up house. And it reveals the complexity of what it is like to be the daughter of a father who has gone to war"--Provided by publisher. "Chasing Ghosts describes how, near the end of his life, the daughter of a veteran of World War II comes to terms with her father, emotionally wounded by his military service through the stories he tells her about his childhood, about his military service in the Navy in the late 1930's, and about his wartime experiences and through her research undertaken to understand her father's life in the context of history. Told through the voice of a daughter seeking answers to her father's life, the narrator journeys into her father's history and the context in which it enfolds. She learns that her father's response had been a mixture of rage and silence and she begins to understand why he has chosen her as an object of his abuse. The narrative provides an understanding of working-class World War II veterans who performed the behind-the-scenes work, like the narrator's father's work as an aviation machinist's mate, necessary to waging war--work that was not conventionally heroic or, until recently, considered worthy of historical or cultural attention. By juxtaposing historical moments in her family's and the country's life, Chasing Ghosts engages in the current necessary conversation about the often unrecognized effects of war and its trauma on World War II veterans, and reinterprets the experience of her father and other such veterans in the context of contemporary understanding about the psychic cost of war and its cross-generational impact on families. In the process, the narrator's lack of knowledge is replaced with empathy for what he's experienced and an understanding of his place in history"--


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Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900 : Bodies, emotion, and material culture
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ISBN: 1526152045 1526128586 Year: 2020 Publisher: [S.l.] : MANCHESTER UNIV PRESS,

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This book offers an innovative account of manliness in Britain between 1760 and 1900. Using diverse textual, visual and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men's bodies -often working-class ones - and the emotions and material culture associated with them. The book analyses idealised men who stimulated desire and admiration, including virile boxers, soldiers, sailors and blacksmiths, brave firemen and noble industrial workers. It also investigates unmanly men, such as drunkards, wife-beaters and masturbators, who elicited disgust and aversion. Unusually, Manliness in Britain runs from the eras of feeling, revolution and reform to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy and mass media, periods often dealt with separately by historians of masculinities.


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Being boys
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ISBN: 9781781704097 1781704090 1526130734 9781526130730 9780719066139 0719066131 071906614X Year: 2012 Publisher: Manchester Manchester University Press

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This work offers a fresh and original approach to the masculinities, subjectivities and emotions of adolescence by exploring the leisure lives of working-class boys and young men in the inter-war years.

Working construction : why white working-class men put themselves--and the labor movement--in harm's way
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ISBN: 0801472865 0801444675 9780801444678 9780801472862 Year: 2006 Publisher: Ithaca, N.Y. : ILR Press,


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Gender, class and occupation : working class men doing dirty work
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ISBN: 113743967X 1137439696 Year: 2016 Publisher: London : Palgrave Macmillan UK : Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan,

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This insightful new study explores an emerging and growing interest in Sociology and Organization Studies which concerns the meanings and experiences of ‘dirty’ work. Based on a unique study of male street cleaners, refuse collectors, graffiti removers and butchers, and drawing on Bourdieu as a theoretical frame, it presents an ‘embodied’ understanding of ‘dirty’ work. Gender, Work and Occupation explores new avenues of workplace studies, highlighting how material conditions both support and constrain processes of occupation-based ideological constructions. Using original field research, the authors put forward a different agenda in terms of how we think about dirty work, and how we can explore and understand the ‘lived experiences’ of dirty workers. .


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Angry white men : American masculinity at the end of an era
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ISBN: 9781568589619 1568589611 9781568589640 9781568586960 Year: 2019 Publisher: New York, N.Y. Bold Type Books

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Sociologist Michael Kimmel, one of the leading writers on men and masculinity, has spent hundreds of hours in the company of America's angry white men--from white supremacists to men's rights activists to young students--in pursuit of a comprehensive diagnosis of their fears, anxieties, and rage. Kimmel locates this increase in anger in the seismic economic, social, and political shifts that have transformed the American landscape: Downward mobility, increased racial and gender equality, and tenaciously clinging to an anachronistic ideology of masculinity has left many men feeling betrayed and bewildered. Raised to expect unparalleled social and economic privilege, white men are suffering today from what Kimmel calls "aggrieved entitlement": a sense that those benefits that white men believed were their due have been snatched away from them. The election of Donald Trump proved that angry white men can still change the course of history. Here, Kimmel argues that we must consider the rage of this "forgotten" group and create solutions that address the concerns of all Americans.


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Darts in England, 1900-1939
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ISBN: 1526129760 9781526129765 Year: 2018 Publisher: Manchester Manchester University Press

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Drawing on an eclectic range of primary and secondary sources Chaplin examines the development of darts in the context of English society in the early twentieth century. He reveals how darts was transformed during the interwar years to become one of the most popular recreations in England, not just amongst working class men and, to a lesser extent, working class women but even (to some extent) among the middle and upper classes. This book assesses the social, economic and cultural forces behind this transformation. This work also considers the growth of the darts manufacturing industry and assesses the overall effect the growing popularity of darts had on interwar society and popular culture, with particular reference to the changing culture and form of the English public house. This original study will be of interest to sports historians, social historians, business historians, sociologists and sports scientists.

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