A Workplace of Their Own: Rockefeller, Roche, and Labor's Battle for Industrial Democracy
Through the lens of Colorado's deadliest coal mining conflicts in the early twentieth century, this book examines the fierce battle for control over the American workplace. Progressivism frames the struggles between four groups, each looking to alleviate the crisis of industrial violence: miners fighting for autonomous control over the mines where they worked, corporate owners asserting complete authority over that land and machinery as their private property, government officials attempting to arbitrate these industrial conflicts, and reformers promoting worker protections and economic independence.
The narrative follows two key figures who practiced rival Progressive reforms in resolving these industrial conflicts. On one hand, John D. Rockefeller Jr. used paternalism and philanthropy to promote the scientific management of his workers' professional and personal lives. On the other hand, Josephine Roche advocated for worker autonomy, collective bargaining and government-backed labor protections. Both of them honed their Progressive ideals in New York City at the turn of the century, and then transported them to Colorado as they took up the management of their businesses. Their reform efforts played out and eventually failed against the backdrop of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the 1927 Columbine Massacre, where miners and, in the case of Ludlow, their families died in violent confrontations.
Both approaches ultimately failed, and their attempts and failures remain relevant today as contemporary workplaces are still sites where workers and corporations grapple with issues around compensation, benefits, and work hours. Who should determine workplace conditions and compensation? Should workers have meaningful input in decisions affecting their livelihoods? These unresolved tensions between labor, management, and government have fostered a situation where neither employers nor employees feel true ownership over their workplace.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
GLOBAL AMERICANS is a comprehensive American history that illustrates how the creation and history of the United States has always been subject to transnational forces and affected by global events and conditions. This global perspective is central to the text, recovering international influences and stories of America’s past that are often overlooked in other narratives. Weaving together a variety of social, political, cultural, economic, and geographic dynamics across time, as well as the stories of individuals who embodied the global American spirit, the authors have crafted a new United States history for today’s diverse and interconnected students. Using print and digital content, GLOBAL AMERICANS pushes students to think critically about primary sources, images, and other media as they learn about the long history of global events which have shaped, and been shaped by, the present day United States. GLOBAL AMERICANS makes U.S. history more relevant and engaging to today’s student..
Although Mexico lost its northern territories to the United States in 1848, battles over property rights and ownership have remained intense. This turbulent, vividly narrated story of the Maxwell Land Grant, a single tract of 1.7 million acres in northeastern New Mexico, shows how contending groups reinterpret the meaning of property to uphold their conflicting claims to land. The Southwest has been and continues to be the scene of a collision between land regimes with radically different cultural conceptions of the land's purpose.
We meet Jicarilla Apaches, whose identity is rooted in a sense of place; Mexican governors and hacienda patrons seeking status as New World feudal magnates; "rings" of greedy territorial politicians on the make; women finding their own way in a man's world; Anglo homesteaders looking for a place to settle in the American West; and Dutch investors in search of gargantuan returns on their capital. The European and American newcomers all "mistranslated" the prior property regimes into new rules, to their own advantage and the disadvantage of those who had lived on the land before them. Their efforts to control the Maxwell Land Grant by wrapping it in their own particular myths of law and custom inevitably led to conflict and even violence as cultures and legal regimes clashed.
