Over 200 years of Reitz family history in letters, photos, and comments, 1790-2010. Reitz glassmakers from Germany worked at John Frederick Amelung's New Bremen (Maryland) Glassmanufactory in the 1790s, then with Albert Gallatin's glassmaking enterprise in New Geneva, Pennsylvania, 1794-97. Ultimately Lewis and Philip Reitz acquired ownership of the Federal Hill Glassworks in Baltimore, Maryland. This family heritage scrapbook includes the lengthy written record of Philip Reitz's 1851 trip back to ancestral villages (Sulzbach, Friedrichsthal) and his visits to Paris and London World's Fair. Herman Gerhardt Boisselier emigrated from Leipzig to San Francisco in 1849, before California had even become a state. He brought a German 48er's enlightened sensibility, valuing freethought, secular and scientific education, and progressive politics to his children, Emma, Victor, Herbert, and George, and via them, to us. Victor and Charles Bartell fought and fell as Union soldiers in the Civil War. They wrote seventeen letters home which are here preserved and transcribed. So too are fourteen letters from Herbert Boisselier who served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898. A letter home from World War I soldiers, Philip and Gerard Reitz, serving in France is included here also, as are three letters describing an eyewitness account of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake from Victor Boisselier, who lived through it. James Buchanan, admittedly not one of the nation's finest presidents (pro-slavery), wrote frequently to one of our g-g-grand fathers (an ancestor of Diana Henrich Reitz), Maj. Charles Shriner, Sr. An 1851 letter urging him to mobilize the Democratic Party apparatus in Pennsylvania is featured here. Maj. Shriner later became a Republican and was a member of the Electoral Collage from Pennsylvania who cast a vote for Abraham Lincoln in 1864. His son, Charles, became a physician, served in the military in the West, and settled in Baxter Springs, Kansas.As a scrapbook project, this volume organizes (in a preliminary fashion) the otherwise sprawling archive of family writings and records from our German-American past. It makes copies of these materials compactly available to everyone who might like to see them, especially our family's newer generations. Its primary source documents may even be of interest someday to further studies of 19th century German-American history.
A timely addition to Henry Giroux’s Critical Interventions series, Ecology and Revolution is grounded in the Frankfurt School critical theory of Herbert Marcuse. Its task is to understand the economic architecture of wealth extraction that undergirds today’s intensifying inequalities of class, race, and gender, within a revolutionary ecological frame. Relying on newly discovered texts from the Frankfurt Marcuse Archive, this book builds theory and practice for an alternate world system. Ecology and radical political economy, as critical forms of systems analysis, show that an alternative world system is essential – both possible and feasible – despite political forces against it. Our rights to a commonwealth economy, politics, and culture reside in our commonworks as we express ourselves as artisans of the common good. It is in this context, that Charles Reitz develops a GreenCommonWealth Counter-Offensive, a strategy for revolutionary ecological liberation with core features of racial equality, women’s equality, liberation of labor, restoration of nature, leisure, abundance, and peace.
Winner of the 2002 American Educational Studies Association's Critics' Choice Award By examining the aesthetic, social, and educational philosophy of Herbert Marcuse, the author documents and demonstrates the structure and movement of Marcuse's thought on art, alienation, and the humanities. Reitz's work stresses the centrality of Marcuse's argument that the arts and humanities may act as disalienating educational forces.
Capitalism has long been armed with its own theory of work and wealth; labor has not. This essay will attempt to re-think a critical philosophical analysis of labor and the human condition and build an alternative vision for labor. Given recent global economic dislocations, the time is ripe to reconstruct a critical theory of work. We will build on, and beyond, the foundational theories of Herbert Marcuse to produce a revitalized theory of society grounded in a critical understanding of human working activity. Herbert Marcuse's political-philosophical vision and cultural critique continue to shed light on current debates concerning repressive democracy, political and racial inequality, education as social control, and the radical meaning of political struggle - especially where issues of alienation, war, oppression, critical inquiry, critical media literacy, and civic/revolutionary action are involved. Marcuse's caustic condemnations of U.S. military aggression, its need for an "enemy," the irrationality of U.S. economic waste, destruction, and affluence, etc., are particularly timely and deserve invigorated attention across this nation's campuses as well as in other cultural and political circles today.Three major reasons compel us to highlight the most radical aspects of Marcuse's thought right now. First of all: Marcuse knew that because capitalism exists, so too does exploitation, and that system change is necessary and possible if we comprehend and refuse the system. He stressed that system change requires a twofold refusal: of its mode of production and the repressive satisfactions that replicate it. Over the last several decades there has been a regression in the comprehensiveness of critical theory. We are returning to Marcuse to fill-in some of the key and notable eco-nomic deficits of contemporary forms of cultural commentary stemming from postmodern literary and aesthetic theory. Secondly, Marcuse not only described the obscenities of global inequality, domination, alienation, and war in an extraordinarily vivid and effective manner, more importantly his writing evokes labor solidarity among subaltern groups across traditional barriers of culture: immigration status, race, gender, wealth and income differentials, and political-philosophical diversity. He elucidated social change strategies needed to help labor reclaim its humanist promise, including tactics for intercultural/multicultural organiza-tional development. Thirdly, Marcuse was aware that critical theory needs to be taught in order to empower the exploited and oppressed, hence the need for radical pedagogy. This booklet presents a curriculum component that contributes to the signature pedagogy of radical social science. It presents an analysis of the centrality of labor within the wealth and value production processes of the U.S. economy today, and critically examines the relationship of property ownership to the origins of income inequality.Economic processes today divest us from our own creative work, yet these also form the sources of our future social power. We have attempted to furnish the beginnings of a more comprehensive critical social theory stressing the centrality of labor in the economy.
The co-authors of this volume are dedicated to intellectual debate and discussion concerning the material human condition. As campus colleagues we have spent countless hours in conversation learning from one another. This collective discourse also led to our frequent involvement in teaching together as a team.This collection of essays brings together research and writing that we have undertaken independently while being also aware of the contributions of others. Much of our work has been previously published in a wide range of academic and scholar/activist venues.A common thread in the studies we present here is our desire to improve human living conditions. We highlight objective economic and social potentials which make greater equality, justice, and abundance attainable, though they are now held back by entrenched political forces.Our joint emphasis is also on the roles of theory, critique, and evaluation. We are attempting to address what we see as a current crisis in economic theorizing and in sociological theory more generally. We see this crisis as rooted in philosophy. Therefore, we shall frequently examine here the relationship between knowledge claims and the ontological claims that condition them.Real structural interconnection exists in our economic lives. Theory may be called critical only if it penetrates beneath empirical economic facts and discerns generative economic, social, and cultural structres that are neither obvious nor apparent. A central focus of this volume is building an emancipatory vision for labor, including academic labor. The recent global economic dislocations demand a re-thinking of the material human condition with greater attention to issues of our economic alienation and dehumanization, the powers of our common work and common wealth, and the rehumanization of global social realities.
Illustrates how Marcuse's theory sheds new light on current debates in both education and society involving issues of multiculturalism, postmodernism, civic education, the "culture wars," critical thinking, and critical literacy.
Scholars who investigate race—a label based upon real or perceived physical differences—realize that they face a formidable task. The concept has been contested and condoned, debated and denied throughout modern history. Presented with the full understanding of the complexity of the issue, Race and Practice in Archaeological Interpretation concentrates on the archaeological analysis of race and how race is determined in the archaeological record. Most archaeologists, even those dealing with recent history, have usually avoided the subject of race, yet Charles E. Orser, Jr., contends that its study and its implications are extremely important for the science of archaeology. Drawing upon his considerable experience as an archaeologist, and using a combination of practice theory as interpreted by Pierre Bourdieu and spatial theory as presented by Henri Lefebvre, Orser argues for an explicit archaeology of race and its interpretation. The author reviews past archaeological usages of race, including a case study from early nineteenth-century Ireland, and explores the way race was used to form ideas about the Mound Builders, the Celts, and Atlantis. He concludes with a proposal that historical archaeology—cast as modern-world archaeology—should take the lead in the archaeological analysis of race because its purview is the recent past, that period during which our conceptions of race developed.
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