Michael Dennis – författare

Through moments of social protest, policy debate, and popular mobilization, this book follows the campaign for economic democracy and the fight for full employment in the United States. Starting in the 1930s, Dennis explores its intellectual and philosophical underpinnings, the class struggle that determined the fate of legislation and the role of left-wing civil rights activists in its revival. Demonstrating how the campaign for full employment intersected with movements for women's liberation and civil rights, it explores how social groups and oppressed minorities interpreted and appropriated the promise of full employment. For many, full employment provided an indispensable path to racial and gender emancipation. In this book, Dennis uncovers the class dimensions and the resistance to full employment in the US. He demonstrates how the recurring debates over full employment consistently exposed the contradictions inherent in a capitalist society and challenged the assertion that an allegedly free enterprise system automatically generated employment for all.

Through moments of social protest, policy debate, and popular mobilization, this book follows the campaign for economic democracy and the fight for full employment in the United States. Starting in the 1930s, Dennis explores its intellectual and philosophical underpinnings, the class struggle that determined the fate of legislation and the role of left-wing civil rights activists in its revival. Demonstrating how the campaign for full employment intersected with movements for women's liberation and civil rights, it explores how social groups and oppressed minorities interpreted and appropriated the promise of full employment. For many, full employment provided an indispensable path to racial and gender emancipation. In this book, Dennis uncovers the class dimensions and the resistance to full employment in the US. He demonstrates how the recurring debates over full employment consistently exposed the contradictions inherent in a capitalist society and challenged the assertion that an allegedly free enterprise system automatically generated employment for all.

On Memorial Day 1937, thousands of steelworkers, middle-class supporters, and working-class activists gathered at Sam's Place on the Southeast Side of Chicago to protest Republic Steel's virulent opposition to union recognition and collective bargaining. By the end of the day, ten marchers had been mortally wounded and more than one hundred badly injured, victims of a terrifying police riot. Sam's Place, the headquarters for the steelworkers, was transformed into a bloody and frantic triage unit for treating heads split open by police batons, flesh torn by bullets, and limbs mangled badly enough to require amputation. While no one doubts the importance of the Memorial Day Massacre, Michael Dennis identifies it as a focal point in the larger effort to revitalize American equality during the New Deal. In Blood on Steel, Dennis shows how the incident-captured on film by Paramount newsreels-validated the claims of labor activists and catalyzed public opinion in their favor. In the aftermath of the massacre, Senate hearings laid bare patterns of anti-union aggression among management, ranging from blacklists to harassment and vigilante violence.Companies were determined to subvert the right to form a union, which Congress had finally recognized in 1935. Only in the following year would Congress pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and a maximum work week, outlawed child labor, and regulated hazardous work. Like the Wagner Act that protected collective bargaining, this law aimed to protect workers who had suffered the worst of what the Great Depression had inflicted. Dennis' wide-angle perspective reveals the Memorial Day Massacre as not simply another bloody incident in the long story of labor-management tension in American history but as an illustration of the broad-based movement for social democracy which developed in the New Deal era.

On Memorial Day 1937, thousands of steelworkers, middle-class supporters, and working-class activists gathered at Sam's Place on the Southeast Side of Chicago to protest Republic Steel's virulent opposition to union recognition and collective bargaining. By the end of the day, ten marchers had been mortally wounded and more than one hundred badly injured, victims of a terrifying police riot. Sam's Place, the headquarters for the steelworkers, was transformed into a bloody and frantic triage unit for treating heads split open by police batons, flesh torn by bullets, and limbs mangled badly enough to require amputation. While no one doubts the importance of the Memorial Day Massacre, Michael Dennis identifies it as a focal point in the larger effort to revitalize American equality during the New Deal. In Blood on Steel, Dennis shows how the incident-captured on film by Paramount newsreels-validated the claims of labor activists and catalyzed public opinion in their favor. In the aftermath of the massacre, Senate hearings laid bare patterns of anti-union aggression among management, ranging from blacklists to harassment and vigilante violence.Companies were determined to subvert the right to form a union, which Congress had finally recognized in 1935. Only in the following year would Congress pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and a maximum work week, outlawed child labor, and regulated hazardous work. Like the Wagner Act that protected collective bargaining, this law aimed to protect workers who had suffered the worst of what the Great Depression had inflicted. Dennis' wide-angle perspective reveals the Memorial Day Massacre as not simply another bloody incident in the long story of labor-management tension in American history but as an illustration of the broad-based movement for social democracy which developed in the New Deal era.

Selected and with an Introduction by Stuart Ross Michael Dennis has been hammering his love, his anger, his grief, and his awe into poems for over forty years. With seven books and nearly twenty chapbooks to his credit, Dennis isn't exactly a household name in Canadian poetry, but he is a natural heir to poets like Canadian icon Al Purdy and American legends Eileen Myles and Charles Bukowski. His poems are his life made into poems: direct, emphatic, honest. Bad Engine brings together mostly revised versions of about one hundred poems selected from Dennis's published work, along with several dozen new poems. This volume, introduced and edited by Dennis's long-time friend, the poet and editor Stuart Ross, marks a milestone in the career of a homegrown, no-bullshit, tells-it-likes-he-sees-it populist bard. Here the reader will find a rollicking tale of drinking with racists, poignant prayers for quiet nights with lovers, raw narratives of childhood abuse, defiant anthems of a body broken by sports injuries, a mindful meditation about a stoned dragonfly, and the not-quite resigned laughter of a man smashing away at a keyboard for four decades and becoming neither rich nor famous. Bad Engine is Michael Dennis being human.

Low Centre of Gravity finds Michael Dennis in familiar territory. You'll laugh. You'll cry. Dennis' poems continue to be the narratives of movies you'd like to someday see. These poems ask the questions you'd really like answered, sauntering into the room and staking claim. The story-telling continues, the good, the bad and the sadly tragic. With Low Centre of Gravity Dennis remains "direct, curious, pissed off and honest".

A play about joy and heartbreak, quarries and transmat beams.When Oli arrives at now-forgotten sci-fi icon Marianne's door, he's looking for an autograph – and maybe a friend. Marianne's hoping for the phone to ring, for her best friend to see her differently, for her turn at something more substantial than a half-remembered role on a cult TV show.As they start to explore each other's worlds, they begin to discover what every good relationship needs: time and space.Exploring the complexities of connection, especially in the LGBTQ+ community, and the contrast in lived experiences across generations, Dark Sublime is a love-letter to British sci-fi television – those that make it and those that adore it.Michael Dennis's debut play premiered at Trafalgar Studios in London's West End in 2019, directed by Andrew Keates and starring Marina Sirtis, best known for appearing in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

This book traces the historic evolution of urban form, principles, and design; it serves as a compendium, or reference, of city design; and is a polemic about the necessity for the recovery of the city and a contemporary urban architecture. It begins with the planned cities of Greece and the Roman Empire from about 500 BC, through the late-medieval Bastides, the Ideal Renaissance cities, and Baroque new towns, to the urban planning strategies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It covers anti-urban modernist architecture and the resulting disintegration of the city. It concludes with late-twentieth-century efforts to recover the city, a contemporary urban architecture, and urbanism’s potential contribution to the contemporary ecological crisis. The book is project oriented and extensively illustrated. It may be read graphically, textually, or both. As such, it falls into the long tradition of illustrated treatises in which theory is embedded in the projects, with only occasional assistance or clarification from the text. Architecture and urban design are physical arts, not verbal arts, and they are best understood from graphic representations.

There are no books that focus on the unique artistic characteristics of the Venetian facade and its potential relevance to contemporary architectural and urban issues, as this book intends. This book is about architecture. It is not about history, although a bit of history is necessary to set the context. It is not about theory, although, again, a bit is necessary to connect the facade with urbanism. It is also not about structure and technology. And, most definitely, it is not about the plan. All of these topics are well-covered elsewhere. This book is about the facade. It explores the art and typology of the Venetian facade, not only as a high point of architectural literacy and achievement, but as a potentially useful contemporary stimulant.