Franklin Rosemont
Joe Hill: The IWW and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture
Charles H. Kerr, 2003

Michael Denning
The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
Verso, 1998

Moe Foner
Not For Bread Alone: A Memoir
Cornell University Press, 2002

Although what we would call modern culture began to take shape in the 19th century, it was not until the first half of the 20th century that it takes the form familiar today, where the main outlines of contemporary culture appear. Popular culture and the entertainment industry; later the contemporary university system and the state funding of art and scholarship; and mass movements and political culture; these all have their roots in the emergence of mass politics, industrial society, imperialism and the centralized state. Culture as a political problem has a long history, but it is not until the 19th century and into the 20th that the status of culture haunts political philosophy and movements. (more…)