Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz - Softcover

Hobsbawm, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565845595 ISBN 13: 9781565845596

Publisher: The New Press, 1999

Synopsis

Highlighting Eric Hobsbawm's passionate concern for the lives and struggles of ordinary men and women, Uncommon People brings back into print his classic works on labor history, working people, and social protest, pairing them with more recent, previously unpublished pieces on everything from the villainy of Roy Cohen to the genius of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holliday. Uncommon People offers both an exciting introduction for the uninitiated as well as a broad-ranging retrospective of the work of "the best-known living historian in the world" (The Times, London).

About this title

Review:

Eric Hobsbawm, the eminent English labor historian, is concerned here with "the sort of people whose names are usually unknown to anyone outside their family and neighbors"--the machinists, grocers, bus conductors, and bartenders who make many small worlds go around. In a series of essays, he looks into the role of shoemakers in European politics (cobblers being a particularly left-leaning lot), the influence of Luddite machine breakers on the labor movement, the abortive union of students and trade unionists in the May 1968 uprising in France, and jazz music, which he considers to be an idiom of the laboring class. These unknown people, in Hobsbawm's view, have made uncommon contributions to their times and are too little honored, even by the international celebration called May Day, the origins of which he traces in an especially fine essay. --Gregory MacNamee

About the Author:

Eric Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria in 1917 and educated in Austria, Germany and England. He taught at Birkbeck College, University of London, and then at the New School for Social Research in New York. In addition to The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and The Age of Extremes, his books include Bandits, Revolutionaries, Uncommon People, and his memoir Interesting Times. Eric Hobsbawm died in 2012.

About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1565845595
• ISBN 13: 9781565845596
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368