Bryan D. Palmer

Gaétan Héroux

"Toronto's Poor reveals the long and too often forgotten history of poor people's resistance. It details how the homeless, the unemployed, and the destitute have struggled to survive and secure food and shelter in the wake of the many panics, downturns, recessions, and depressions that punctuate the years from the 1830s to the present. Written by a working-class historian and a poor people's activist, this is a rebellious book that links past and present in an almost two-hundred year story of struggle and resistance. It is about men, women, and children relegated to lives of desperation by an uncaring system, and how they have refused to be defeated. In that refusal, and in winning better conditions for themselves, Toronto's poor create the possibility of a new kind of society, one ordered not by acquisition and individual advance, but by appreciations of collective rights and responsibilities."--

A Rebellious History

Toronto's Poor

"Critical theory is no substitute for historical materialism; language is not life." With this statement, Bryan Palmer enters the debate that is now transforming and disrupting a number of academic disciplines, including political science, women's studies, and history. Focusing on the ways in which literary or critical theory is being promoted within the field of social history, he argues forcefully that the current reliance on poststructuralism--with its reification of discourse and avoidance of the structures of oppression and struggles of resistance--obscures the origins, meanings, and consequences of historical events and processes. Palmer is concerned with the emergence of "language" as a central focus of intellectual work in the twentieth century. He locates the implosion of theory that moved structuralism in the direction of poststructuralism and deconstruction in what he calls the descent into discourse. Few historians who champion poststructuralist thought, according to Palmer, appreciate historical materialism's capacity to address discourse meaningfully. Nor do many of the advocates of language within the field of social history have an adequate grounding in the theoretical making of the project they champion so ardently. Palmer roots his polemical challenge in an effort to "introduce historians more fully to the theoretical writing that many are alluding to and drawing from rather cavalierly." Acknowledging that critical theory can contribute to an understanding of some aspects of the past, Palmer nevertheless argues for the centrality of materialism to the project of history. In specific discussions of how critical theory is constructing histories of politics, class, and gender, he traces the development of the descent into discourse within social history, mapping the limitations of recent revisionist texts. Much of this writing, he contends, is undertheorized and represents a problematic retreat from prior histories that attempted to address such material forces as economic structures, political power, and class struggle. Descent into Discourse counters current intellectual fashion with an eloquent argument for the necessity to analyze and appreciate lived experience and the structures of subordination and power in any quest for historical meaning.

The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History

Descent Into Discourse

Goodyear Invades Backcountry

Joan Sangster

Labouring Canada: Class, Gender, and Race in Canadian Working-Class History is a collection of 28 classic and contemporary essays exploring the complex interactions of class, gender, and race in the working lives of Canadians from the late eighteenth century to the present. The older classics lay the groundwork for the field of labour history in general, while the more recent contributions focus more specifically on issues of race, class, and gender. The range of topics examined is broad: from class relations in the fur trade, Aboriginal longshoremen in British Columbia, and racial discrimination against CNR porters to the negotiation of class in mid-1800s Nova Scotia, the Montreal teachers' strike of 1949, burlesque workers in 1970s BC, and the nature of the unpaid work performed by women in the home. Designed as a core text for undergraduate courses in labour history, this diverse collection provides an engaging and comprehensive introduction to the field. Readings are organized chronologically and thematically in eleven sections. Each section begins with an introduction that outlines the necessary historical context. Each section introduction includes a list of related resources. All essays have been edited and abridged to make them more accessible to undergraduate readers. Book jacket.

Class, Gender, and Race in Canadian Working-class History

Labouring Canada

Paul Le Blanc

This last of three documentary volumes, U.S. Trotskyism 1928-1965. Part III: Resurgence, spans 1954 to 1965, and includes a rich selection of primary sources on labor and social struggles, intellectual history, and the revolutionary impact of Leon Trotsky’s perspectives on U.S. socialism.

Uneven and Combined Development. Dissident Marxism in the United States: Volume 4

U.S. Trotskyism 1928-1965. Part III: Resurgence

A teacher of working-class and social history, and editor of the Canadian journal Labour/Le Travail, Palmer chronicles those who defied authority, choosing to live dangerously outside the defining cultural constraints of early insurgent--and later dominant--capitalism. They include peasants, religious heretics, witches, pirates, runaway slaves, prostitutes and pornographers, frequenters of taverns and fraternal society lodge rooms, revolutionaries, blues and jazz musicians, beats, and contemporary youth gangs. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression

Cultures of Darkness

James P. Cannon (1890-1974) helped build the American revolutionary left. Reared in a radical Midwestern household, he served a class struggle apprenticeship in the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the underground communist movement. From the founding of the Workers Party in 1921, Cannon guided the forces of United States communism. Increasingly disappointed in the international and domestic leadership of the revolutionary movement, Cannon eventually embraced Trotsky's criticisms of emerging Stalinism. When he was expelled from the Workers (Communist) Party in 1928, a particular age of U.S. radicalism had come to an end, but another was just beginning. Bryan D. Palmer's magisterial study is both a biographical treatment of Cannon's formative years as well as a richly detailed and passionately argued examination of a pivotal epoch of American radicalism. Meticulously and imaginatively researched, it brings to life a major figure in the underappreciated United States revolutionary tradition. It also recasts our understanding of those movements Cannon championed, from the Wobblies and Left-Wing of the Socialist Party to early communism and its decline under Stalinization.

James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928

Edward Thompson, perhaps the greatest post-war historian in the English-speaking world, died in 1993. In this readable and unabashedly appreciative survey of Thompson's histories and politics, Byran D. Palmer reviews include a passionate biographical account of the late-nineteenth-century Romantic William Morris, the hugely acclaimed The Making of the English Working Class, and a series of eighteenth-century studies that reach from customary culture to the antinomian poetics of William Blake. In reviewing the politics which gave shape to his historical work, Palmer assesses the role of Thompson's family background in India, his youth in the Communist Party, his decisive break with Stalinism in 1956, and his subsequent work campaigning for the causes of the left and nuclear disarmament. Thompson was never comfortable in an academic milieu, and eventually left formal teaching in the 1970s to devote his time to research and writing. His pen was always ready to bend against the powers of the state, and against a left he too often saw as abandoning the cause of social transformation. For readers who know Thompson's work, Palmer's discussion of hitherto unstudied aspects of his life will be novel and illuminating; those less familiar with his prodigious achievement will find these pages a useful introduction.

Objections and Oppositions

E.P. Thompson

Peasants, religious heretics, witches, pirates, runaway slaves, prostitutes and pornographers, frequenters of taverns and fraternal society lodge rooms, revolutionaries, blues and jazz musicians, beats, and contemporary youth gangs--those who defied authority, choosing to live outside the defining cultural dominions of early insurgent and, later, dominant capitalism are what Bryan D. Palmer calls people of the night. These lives of opposition, or otherness, were seen by the powerful as deviant, rejecting authority, and consequently threatening to the established order. Constructing a rich historical tapestry of example and experience spanning eight centuries, Palmer details lives of exclusion and challenge, as the "night travels" of the transgressors clash repeatedly with the powerful conventions of their times. Nights of liberation and exhilarating desire--sexual and social--are at the heart of this study. But so too are the dangers of darkness, as marginality is coerced into corners of pressured confinement, or the night is used as a cover for brutalizing terror, as was the case in Nazi Germany or the lynching of African Americans. Making extensive use of the interdisciplinary literature of marginality found in scholarly work in history, sociology, cultural studies, literature, anthropology, and politics, Palmer takes an unflinching look at the rise and transformation of capitalism as it was lived by the dispossessed and those stamped with the mark of otherness.

Focusing on the major movements and personalities of the time, as well as the lasting influence of the period,Canada's 1960s examines the legacy of this rebellious decade's impact on contemporary notions of Canadian identity.

Bryan D. Palmer

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