Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front

Author: Basso Matthew L.

Brand: University of Chicago Press

Edition: Illustrated

Features:

• Used Book in Good Condition

Format: Illustrated

Number Of Pages: 360

Details: Product Description

“I realize that I am a soldier of production whose duties are as important in this war as those of the man behind the gun.” So began the pledge that many home front men took at the outset of World War II when they went to work in the factories, fields, and mines while their compatriots fought in the battlefields of Europe and on the bloody beaches of the Pacific. The male experience of working and living in wartime America is rarely examined, but the story of men like these provides a crucial counter-narrative to the national story of Rosie the Riveter and GI Joe that dominates scholarly and popular discussions of World War II.

In Meet Joe Copper, Matthew L. Basso describes the formation of a powerful, white, working-class masculine ideology in the decades prior to the war, and shows how it thrived—on the job, in the community, and through union politics. Basso recalls for us the practices and beliefs of the first- and second-generation immigrant copper workers of Montana while advancing the historical conversation on gender, class, and the formation of a white ethnic racial identity. Meet Joe Copper provides a context for our ideas of postwar masculinity and whiteness and finally returns the men of the home front to our reckoning of the Greatest Generation and the New Deal era.

Review

“The best book of the history of U.S. labor, and one of the best on masculinity, to appear in years.” ― David Roediger, Contexts

“This well-written book centers on the historical experiences of workers, women, and people of color in a regional home-front context during WW II. As such, it meets the need for more scholarship on the home front during the war. Recent trends in US social history regarding the relationship between identity formation and relations of power greatly influence the book. Basso describes the formation of a powerful, white, working-class masculine ideology in the decades prior to WWII, and shows how it thrived on the job, in the community, and through union politics. Basso recalls the practices and beliefs of the first- and second-generation immigrant copper workers of Montana while advancing the historical conversation on gender, class, and the formation of a white ethnic racial identity.” ― CHOICE

“A sophisticated, ambitious, well-written book.” ― Journal of American History

“Meet Joe Copper provides a rich glimpse into the formation of masculinity in a time and place where white male prerogative came under challenge at local, state, and national levels. Basso’s analysis of the mining communities of Montana displays the interaction of race and gender and charts competing elements that formed a mutating masculinity.” ― Montana Magazine

“Meet Joe Copper makes an important contribution to our understanding of the home front experience in the United States during World War II by showing that the received national narrative was more complex than commonly believed, at least in some places and some industries.” ― Industrial Archeology

“Matthew L. Basso’s evidence and interpretations regarding the significance of masculinity to the values, actions, and concerns of working class civilian men in Montana’s copper industry substantially revise our understandings of the middle decades of the twentieth century.” — Karen Anderson ― author of Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II

“Rosie the Riveter, move over! Here comes Joe Copper in a theoretically sophisticated, widely researched, and ever-engaging history that uncovers the making of gender and race. In this powerful labor and community history of the mines and smelters, Italian, Croatian, and Irish men struggled with management over the hiring of nonmales and nonwhites as much as over their workload and pay. After Matthew L. Basso, ‘the greatest generation’ must include home front men—their representations as well as actions, their subjectivities along with their prejudices. World War II will never look

Release Date: 17-07-2013

Package Dimensions: 23x229x499