Here are 100 books that The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes fans have personally recommended if you like
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.
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I’m a medieval historian, and I’ve written academic books and articles about the history of the medieval world, but I have also written two historical novels. I became interested in history in general and the Middle Ages in particular from reading historical fiction as a child (Jean Plaidy!). The past is another country, and visiting it through fiction is an excellent way to get a feel for it, for its values, norms, and cultures, for how it is different from and similar to our own age. I’ve chosen novels that I love that do this especially well, and bring to light less well-known aspects of the Middle Ages.
It is difficult to imagine a list of great novels about the Middle Ages that does not include this book.
I read it first when I was in graduate school, and it brought so much of what I was studying to life – the monastic world of its setting with all its contradictions and spectacular architecture; fights over religion and the true nature of spirituality; the non-linear nature of medieval literature.
I love how it can be read on one level as a page-turny murder mystery and on another as a post-modern novel that explores the nature of signs and meaning. Its mystificatory preface reveals the distance between the medieval world and what we can say about it.
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective.
William collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey where extraordinary things are happening under the cover of night. A spectacular popular and critical success, The Name of the Rose is not only a narrative of a murder investigation but an astonishing chronicle of the Middle Ages.
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I vividly recall learning about public libraries as a kid: if I signed up for a library card I could take ANY of these books home to read?! From the first, I loved books as physical objects on library shelves—savoring their covers and carefully reading their spines as clues to the stories within. I ended up as a professor of literature who does not just study the words, or texts, of novels (my specialty), but how stories are made into books and circulate in the culture. Everything from graphic design to price can influence our interpretation of a story, even before we read the first word...
I love this utterly unexpected book for its deadpan humor, animated prose, and strange and wondrous facts about the horror-filled history of libraries and the humans who run these book depositories. That CIA-trained librarians, a mere few decades ago, guillotined newspapers and books in the worship of microfilm is an incredibly painful truth in today’s digital age.
Baker’s outrage is palpable, and yet he made me laugh out loud on almost every nerdy page. I’m jealous of his way of speaking. I put this one on syllabi whenever I can.
The ostensible purpose of a library is to preserve the printed word. But for fifty years our country’s libraries–including the Library of Congress–have been doing just the opposite, destroying hundreds of thousands of historic newspapers and replacing them with microfilm copies that are difficult to read, lack all the color and quality of the original paper and illustrations, and deteriorate with age.
With meticulous detective work and Baker’s well-known explanatory power, Double Fold reveals a secret history of microfilm lobbyists, former CIA agents, and warehouses where priceless archives are destroyed with a machine called a guillotine. Baker argues passionately for…
I vividly recall learning about public libraries as a kid: if I signed up for a library card I could take ANY of these books home to read?! From the first, I loved books as physical objects on library shelves—savoring their covers and carefully reading their spines as clues to the stories within. I ended up as a professor of literature who does not just study the words, or texts, of novels (my specialty), but how stories are made into books and circulate in the culture. Everything from graphic design to price can influence our interpretation of a story, even before we read the first word...
I love the grit and heroism of this story about the history of the humble Armed Services Editions. My own university holds one of the largest collections of these small wartime reprints that were sized to fit into the pocket of a GI’s uniform.
So, I initially reached for this book out of duty but then relished it for its compelling historical facts and vividly bookish humanity.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. While the Nazis were burning hundreds of millions of books across Europe, America printed and shipped 140 million books to its troops. The "heartwarming" story of how an army of librarians and publishers lifted spirits and built a new democratic audience of readers is as inspiring today as it was then (New York Times).
When America entered World War II in 1941, we faced an enemy that had banned and burned 100 million books. Outraged librarians launched a campaign to send free books to American troops and gathered 20 million hardcover donations.
Separating the true stories from the myths, The Duty of Memory provides a deeper understanding of the diverse motivations that drove ordinary people to join an underground network of French Resistants despite terrible odds and horrifying consequences.
This book takes the reader inside the true story of men and women…
I vividly recall learning about public libraries as a kid: if I signed up for a library card I could take ANY of these books home to read?! From the first, I loved books as physical objects on library shelves—savoring their covers and carefully reading their spines as clues to the stories within. I ended up as a professor of literature who does not just study the words, or texts, of novels (my specialty), but how stories are made into books and circulate in the culture. Everything from graphic design to price can influence our interpretation of a story, even before we read the first word...
I love how every little detail of every surviving copy of the famous Gutenberg Bible (a binding, illuminations, a bit of marginalia, etc.) is investigated for clues to its monastic first owners, the book’s travels, and repairs. The chapters read like episodes of CSI.
Yes, my university owns a Gutenberg copy, so this started as another duty read but ended in true love. A big expensive book about the first big expensive book better be good, right? Well, this one is better than good—it is a tour of the force of book sleuthing. I fetishize the illustrations and how this book, cleverly, is roughly the size of a Gutenberg volume.
The Gutenberg Bible is widely recognized as Europe's first printed book, a book that forever changed the world. However, despite its initial impact, fame was fleeting: for the better part of three centuries the Bible was virtually forgotten; only after two centuries of tenacious and contentious scholarship did it attain its iconic status as a monument of human invention. Editio princeps: A History of the Gutenberg Bible is the first book to tell the whole story of Europe's first printed edition, describing its creation at Mainz circa 1455, its impact on fifteenth-century life and religion, its fall into oblivion during…
I am a lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster. I write regularly on popular music and culture in scholarly form and as a critic in various publications. I am convinced that popular music can gesture at utopia despite its emergence from within a capitalist market society.
Sometimes, the analytical frame of a book completely changes one’s understanding of a phenomenon, and that was the case with this history of work song.
By showing that singing and music-making at work were silenced in the latter half of the 19th century by the noise of machines and the discipline of factory bosses, Korczynski et. al. provided me with a wholly new way to understand the function of music in an industrialized capitalist society: in terms of the segregation of labor and leisure.
Whether for weavers at the handloom, labourers at the plough or factory workers on the assembly line, music has often been a key texture in people's working lives. This book is the first to explore the rich history of music at work in Britain and charts the journey from the singing cultures of pre-industrial occupations, to the impact and uses of the factory radio, via the silencing effect of industrialisation. The first part of the book discusses how widespread cultures of singing at work were in pre-industrial manual occupations. The second and third parts of the book show how musical…
I have an unusual personal history. I majored in math in college and aspired to a life as a scientist. However, the civil rights movement and other events of the 1960s and 1970s inspired me to switch and earn a doctorate in sociology. (Which considers itself a science.) My first faculty position, at Yale beginning in 1972, involved a joint appointment in the Sociology Department and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, which focused on public policy. During the remainder of my career I have worked and published together with economists and sought to do research that uses the perspectives of both fields.
Sociologist Cherlin was one of the earliest researchers to become aware of the importance of how, during the second half of the 20th century, during the computer revolution when skill demands of jobs were increasing, the job market collapsed for workers without a college education.
Without a stable job paying a living wage, men and women without a 4-year college education could not see their way to a stable marriage that prepared children for school and life success. This decimated blue-collar families, and led to "culture wars," and working-class resentment of college-educated elites.
Many of these less-educated individuals have left their traditional place in the Democratic party, and come to form Trump's and the Republican's voting base.
Two generations ago, young men and women with only a high-school degree would have entered the plentiful industrial occupations which then sustained the middle-class ideal of a male-breadwinner family. Such jobs have all but vanished over the past forty years, and in their absence ever-growing numbers of young adults now hold precarious, low-paid jobs with few fringe benefits. Facing such insecure economic prospects, less-educated young adults are increasingly forgoing marriage and are having children within unstable cohabiting relationships. This has created a large marriage gap between them and their more affluent, college-educated peers. In Labor’s Love Lost, noted sociologist Andrew…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
I am a Wiltshire-based writer with a passion for historical and literary fiction and a fascination for the role of “memory” in the autumn of our lives. My own novel was inspired by conversations with my late grandfather in his final years. But as a journalist for more than 20 years, I had many rich opportunities to talk to the elderly members of our communities–most memorably, taking a pair of D-Day veterans back to the beaches of Normandy. In many ways, memories are the only things we can take with us throughout our lives, carrying both the burden of regrets and the consolation of those we have loved.
The novel tells the story of a group of friends who have taken it upon themselves to carry out the “last orders” of their drinking partner, Jack Dodds, to deliver his ashes to the grey seas of Margate. As they drive to the coast, their errand becomes a poignant journey into their collective pasts.
Swift described it as an homage to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and it follows a similar narrative structure, with chapters titled with the names of the seven key characters, with a shifting narrative perspective to follow the story from each of their eyes.
As a reader, you naturally find your favourite narrative viewpoint. For me, it was Ray, “Lucky Ray,” the obsessive gambler, which for me was the real centre of the novel.
The classic edition of one of the 20th Century's finest novels
Four men once close to Jack Dodds, a London butcher, meet to carry out his peculiar last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea at Margate. For reasons best known to herself, Jack's widow, Amy, declines to join them . . . On the surface a simple tale of an increasingly bizarre day's outing, this Booker-prize winning, internationally acclaimed novel is a resonant and classic exploration of the complexity and courage of ordinary lives. Intensely local but overwhelmingly universal, faithful to…
My passion for visions and pathways to a better world is based on three main cornerstones: (1) The discontent with the current state of affairs in our immediate cultural environment as well as in geopolitics. (2) My belief is that successful action needs visions, including scientific visions. (3) The experience that visions interact with their Implementation; they actually live by being put into (partial) existence. And since we are all parts of the same biological species, we are able to develop also via writing and reading.
In 2011, I spent a semester in London; I had arranged to meet Eric Hobsbawm, the famous historian whom I adored. Unfortunately, he was too ill when I arrived and died before I could meet him. In this book he did not only surprise me with his insight into episodes of rebellions and revolutions, what is even more scintillating is that he mixes all that with the evolving emergence of the particular world of jazz.
Rarely a personality with such broad scientific knowledge has managed to be so uncommonly common in its very specific empathy for a particular cultural obsession. The book shows how important it is to walk on two feet: The ordinary animal within its species and the extraordinary scientific observer, letting his spirit fly above singular events.
These 26 essays range over the history of working men and women between the late18th century and the present day. They include Hobsbawm's pioneering studies in labour history and social protest - the formation of the British workin class, labour custom and traditions, the political radicalism of 19th century shoemakers, male and female images in revolutionary movements, the machine-breakers, revolution and sex, peasants and politics, the rules of violence, the common-sense of Tom Paine. There are more recent reflections: on the May Day holiday; the Vietnam War; socialism and the avantgarde; Mario Puzo, the Mafia and the Sicilian bandit Salvatore…
I’m the author of five books on subjects ranging from comedy and music to sports and pants (specifically, blue jeans). I’m a longtime Boston Globe contributor, a former San Francisco Chronicle staff critic, and a onetime editor for Rolling Stone. I help develop podcasts and other programming for Sirius and Pandora. I teach in the Journalism department at Emerson College, and I am the Program Director for the Newburyport Documentary Film Festival and the co-founder of Lit Crawl Boston.
I devoured this book on the recommendation of my friend Otis Gibbs, a songwriter with a particular interest in the great tradition of songs of, by, and for the working class. “Educate – Agitate – Organize,” reads the Joe Hill mural painted on the side of a rare books store in Salt Lake City, where the Wobbly songwriter was sentenced to death by firing squad in 1915. In The Man Who Never Died (2011), journalist William M. Adler contextualizes the vital importance of songs like Hill’s to the union movement, and he uncovers new details about the activist’s controversial conviction.
In 1914, Joe Hill, the prolific songwriter for the Industrial Workers of the World (also known as the Wobblies), was convicted of murder in Utah and sentenced to death by firing squad, igniting international controversy. In the first major biography of the radical historical icon, William M. Adler explores an extraordinary life and presents persuasive evidence of Hill's innocence. Hill would become organized labor's most venerated martyr, and a hero to folk singers such as Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. His story shines a beacon on the early-twentieth-century American experience and exposes the roots of issues critical to the twenty-first…
Pioneer Paddles of the Colonial South
by
William D. Auman,
Award-winning novelist William Auman, author of If Trees Could Testify..., takes the reader on a time-traveling odyssey featuring 345 bodies of water in six states within the historical context through which they unfold.
Journey into remaining Colonial-era wilderness with stories of pirate treasure, epic frontiersmen, Indigenous Peoples, and Revolutionary…
I am a former network television executive who is fascinated by the history of mass media and have authored or co-authored nine books and many articles on the subject. These include The Complete Directory to Primetime Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present and Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919. I’m particularly drawn to subjects that are underexplored, or which seem to be greatly misunderstood today. I quickly learned that you are not likely to earn a living from writing, so I decided to write about subjects I cared about, and hopefully add something to our knowledge of cultural history. I became more aware of what the professional minstrel show was really like while researching Lost Sounds, based on original accounts, recordings, and films.
A highly opinionated, and thus sometimes frustrating, analysis of the pre-Civil War minstrel show, and how it impacted both oppressed African-Americans and the working-class whites who made the shows so popular. This was the first major book to advance the idea that the minstrel show was not only an exploitation of black culture (the “theft”), but also appreciated that culture and began its integration into the American musical mainstream (the “love”), which would prove to have profound implications in decades to come. An influential book that has been frequently cited in subsequent works.
For over two centuries, America has celebrated the very black culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show sometimes usefully intensified them. Based on the appropriation of black dialect, music, and dance, minstrelsy at once applauded and lampooned black culture, ironically contributing to a "blackening of America." Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and social history, Eric Lott examines the role of the blackface minstrel show in the political struggles of the years leading…
