Review\n@BODNAR\Lives of Their Own@Winner of the Oscar Halecki Prize. "Important and well-written ... for the first time systematically views the black experience side by side with the white ethnic experience against a panorama of the changing urban environment." -- Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine

Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960 (Working Class in American History)

History

Simon, Roger

Bodnar, John

Weber, Michael P.

Americas

University of Illinois Press

Lives of Their Own depicts the strikingly different lives of black, Italian, and Polish immigrants in Pittsburgh. Within a comparative framework, the book focuses on the migration process itself, job procurement, and occupational mobility, family structure, home-ownership, and neighborhood institutions. By blending oral histories with quantitative data, the authors have created a convincing multilayered portrait of working-class life in one of our great industrial cities.

"... an excellent broad overview... " ―Journal of Social History
"... powerfully argued... " ―Moses Rischin
"... imaginative and soundly based... " ―Choice
"Highly recommended... " ―Library Journal
"... an outstanding major contribution to the literature on immigration history." ―History
"... a very important new synthesis of American immigration history... " ―Journal of American Ethnic History
"... a state of the art discussion, impressively encyclopaedic... The Transplanted is a tour de force, and a fitting summation to Bodnar’s own prolific, creative, and insightful writings on immigrants." ―Journal of Interdisciplinary History
A major survey of the immigrant experience between 1830 and 1930, this book has implications for all students and scholars of American social history.

The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Interdisciplinary Studies in History)

Indiana University Press

Looks at the experiences of immigrants adjusting to their new lives in American industrial cities, and discusses unions, social mobility, religion, folk life, and politics

The American experience in the Vietnam War has been the subject of a vast body of scholarly work, yet surprisingly little has been written about how the war is remembered by Vietnamese themselves. The Country of Memory fills this gap in the literature by addressing the subject of history, memory, and commemoration of the Vietnam War in modern day Vietnam. This pathbreaking volume details the nuances, sources, and contradictions in both official and private memory of the War, providing a provocative assessment of social and cultural change in Vietnam since the 1980s. Inspired by the experiences of Vietnamese veterans, artists, authorities, and ordinary peasants, these essays examine a society undergoing a rapid and traumatic shift in politics and economic structure. Each chapter considers specific aspects of Vietnamese culture and society, such as art history, commemorative rituals and literature, gender, and tourism. The contributors call attention to not only the social milieu in which the work of memory takes place, but also the historical context in which different representations of the past are constructed. Drawing from a variety of sources, such as prison memoirs, commemorative shrines, funerary rituals, tourist sites and brochures, advertisements, and films, the authors piece together the disparate representations of the past in Vietnam. With these rare perspectives, The Country of Memory makes an important contribution to debates within postcolonial studies, as well as to the literature on memory, Vietnam, and the Vietnam War.

The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes) (Volume 3)

Tai, Hue-Tam Ho

Asia

University of California Press

In a compelling inquiry into public events ranging from the building of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial through ethnic community fairs to pioneer celebrations, John Bodnar explores the stories, ideas, and symbols behind American commemorations over the last century. Such forms of historical consciousness, he argues, do not necessarily preserve the past but rather address serious political matters in the present.

Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century

Princeton University Press

Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2003
From Tom Joad to Norma Rae to Spike Lee's Mookie in Do the Right Thing, Hollywood has regularly dramatized the lives and struggles of working people in America. Ranging from idealistic to hopeless, from sympathetic to condescending, these portrayals confronted audiences with the vital economic, social, and political issues of their times while providing a diversion―sometimes entertaining, sometimes provocative―from the realities of their own lives.
In Blue-Collar Hollywood, John Bodnar examines the ways in which popular American films made between the 1930s and the 1980s depicted working-class characters, comparing these cinematic representations with the aspirations of ordinary Americans and the promises made to them by the country's political elites. Based on close and imaginative viewings of dozens of films from every genre―among them Public Enemy, Black Fury, Baby Face, The Grapes of Wrath, It's a Wonderful Life, I Married a Communist, A Streetcar Named Desire, Peyton Place, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Coal Miner's Daughter, and Boyz N the Hood―this book explores such topics as the role of censorship, attitudes toward labor unions and worker militancy, racism, the place of women in the workforce and society, communism and the Hollywood blacklist, and faith in liberal democracy.
Whether made during the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, or the Vietnam era, the majority of films about ordinary working Americans, Bodnar finds, avoided endorsing specific political programs, radical economic reform, or overtly reactionary positions. Instead, these movies were infused with the same current of liberalism and popular notion of democracy that flow through the American imagination.

Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

Johns Hopkins University Press

From Tom Joad to Norma Rae to Spike Lee's Mookie in Do the Right Thing, Hollywood has regularly dramatized the lives and struggles of working people in America. Ranging from idealistic to hopeless, from sympathetic to condescending, these portrayals confronted audiences with the vital economic, social, and political issues of their times while providing a diversionÑsometimes entertaining, sometimes provocativeÑfrom the realities of their own lives. In Blue-Collar Hollywood, John Bodnar examines the ways in which popular American films made between the 1930s and the 1980s depicted working-class characters, comparing these cinematic representations with the aspirations of ordinary Americans and the promises made to them by the country's political elites. Based on close and imaginative viewings of dozens of films from every genreÑamong them Public Enemy, Black Fury, Baby Face, The Grapes of Wrath, It's a Wonderful Life, I Married a Communist, A Streetcar Named Desire, Peyton Place, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Coal Miner's Daughter, and Boyz N the HoodÑthis book explores such topics as the role of censorship, attitudes toward labor unions and worker militancy, racism, the place of women in the workforce and society, communism and the Hollywood blacklist, and faith in liberal democracy. Whether made during the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, or the Vietnam era, the majority of films about ordinary working Americans, Bodnar finds, avoided endorsing specific political programs, radical economic reform, or overtly reactionary positions. Instead, these movies were infused with the same current of liberalism and popular notion of democracy that flow through the American imagination.

The "Good War" in American Memory dispels the long-held myth that Americans forged an agreement on why they had to fight in World War II. John Bodnar's sociocultural examination of the vast public debate that took place in the United States over the war's meaning reveals that the idea of the "good war" was highly contested.
Bodnar's comprehensive study of the disagreements that marked the American remembrance of World War II in the six decades following its end draws on an array of sources: fiction and nonfiction, movies, theater, and public monuments. He identifies alternative strands of memory—tragic and brutal versus heroic and virtuous—and reconstructs controversies involving veterans, minorities, and memorials. In building this narrative, Bodnar shows how the idealism of President Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms was lost in the public commemoration of World War II, how the war's memory became intertwined in the larger discussion over American national identity, and how it only came to be known as the "good war" many years after its conclusion.

The "Good War" in American Memory

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bodnar, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bodnar, John

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bodnar, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960 (Working Class in American History)

Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900-1960 (Working Class in American History)

The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Interdisciplinary Studies in History)

The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Interdisciplinary Studies in History)

The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes) (Volume 3)

Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century

Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century

Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film

Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film

The "Good War" in American Memory