Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz
By Eric Hobsbawn
360 Pages (Hardcover)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Direct Order from our UK warehouse; delivery 4-6 weeks -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT THE BOOK: This collection of 26 essays ranges over the history of working men and women between the late 18th century and the present day, and brings back into print a selection of this celebrated historian's pioneering studies in labour history, together with more recent reflections previously unpublished in book form. Eric Hobsbawm's penetrating essays on labour history and social protest (written between the early 1950s and the early 1980s) opened up a new field of study and set standards of wideranging, evocative, incisive analysis. Essays in this collection include the formation of the British working class; labour custom and traditions; the political radicalism of 19th century shoemakers; male and female images in revolutionary movements; the machinebreakers; revolution and sex; peasants and politics; the rules of violence; and the common-sense of Tom Paine. More recent essays include meditations on the May Day holiday; the Vietnam War; socialism and the avantgarde; Mario Puzo, th! e Mafia and the Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano; and the cultural consequences of Christopher Columbus. There are thoughts on the rise and fall of jazz, and tributes to some of its legendary figures -Count Basic, Sidnev Bechet and Duke Ellington - and the tragic blues-singer Billie Holiday. Throughout these essays runs a passionate concern for the lives and struggles of ordinary men and women - uncommon people, all of them.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Eric Hobsbawn was born in Alexandria in 1917 and educated in Vienna, Berlin, London and Cambridge.. A Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with honorary degrees from universities in several countries, he taught until retirement at Birkbeck College, University of London, and since then at the New School for Social Research in New York In addition to The Age of Revolution 1789-1848, The Age of Capital 1848-1875, The Aye of Empire 1875-1914 and Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914- 1991, his books include Primitive Rebels, Labouring Men, Worlds of Labour, Industry and Empire, Bandits and On History. All have been translated into several languages.
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