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Originally published in 1926, this volume is much more than a biography of an outstanding politician, social reformer and philosopher. It provides an analysis of the history of social conditions in England during the nineteenth century, as well as a discussion of the development of social affairs and the inertia of political psychology. The role that faith and religion played in motivating Lord Shaftesbury's desire for social reform is also discussed as is the ways in which he and John Wesley transformed the social and ethical ideas of England to enshrine in law many of the working conditions that we take for granted today such as defined hours of work and rest periods.

A prize-winning historian details his intellectual and political evolution Written by the author of the landmark book The Wages of Whiteness and one of the key figures in the critical study of race and racism in America, An Ordinary White is the life story of the historian and radical American writer, David Roediger.With wry wit and keen observation, Roediger chronicles his intellectual and political evolution from growing up in his southern Midwest sundown town to becoming a leading figure in working-class his­tory and Whiteness studies. A latecomer to the New Left, a longtime figure in the Chicago Surrealist Group, and part of the collective reviving of the Charles Kerr Company—the world's oldest socialist publisher—Roediger captures events and characters absent from standard histories of the left as well as such icons of resistance as Studs Terkel, Noel Ignatiev, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, and C. L. R. James.A direct response to the venom, effectiveness, and durability of white nationalist attacks on Critical Race Theory, this memoir describes Roediger's youth as “ordinary,” both in its unfolding in a lower-middle-class family of southern Illinois workers and in the depth of white racism he was taught. He considers himself “saved” by social movements of his time, including those of labor, against empire, and, above all, the Black Freedom struggle. Public education, dissenting currents in Catholicism, knowledge of the importance of good union jobs, and generative impulses in sports and music helped make his salvation stick.Roediger's knowledge of white advantage came from his personal everyday experiences, but among people ordinary enough to guard against the mistaken notion that poor and working-class whites are uniquely the culprits of white nationalism. Importantly he argues against the character­ization of them as intractably racist or incapable of understanding the advantages of whiteness. A teacher in state universities for forty years, Roediger has tirelessly fought against their being hollowed out by corporate values and austerity. In An Ordinary White, he writes movingly of these experiences and what we have lost in our institutions whose soaring rhetoric outstrips any ability to defend education or racial justice.