Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience
Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience
edited by Eric Arnesen, Julie Greene and Bruce Laurie contributions by Kathryn J Oberdeck, Kimberley L. Phillips, Ileen A DeVault, James R. Barrett, Peter Rachleff, Reeve Huston, Bruce Laurie, Shelton Stromquist, Cecelia Bucki, Tera W. Hunter and Gunther Peck
University of Illinois Press, 1998 eISBN: 978-0-252-05470-9 | Cloth: 978-0-252-02407-8 | Paper: 978-0-252-06710-5 Library of Congress Classification HD8057.L28 1998 Dewey Decimal Classification 331.0973
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Is class outmoded as a basis for understanding labor history? This collection emphatically answers, "No!" These thirteen essays delve into subjects like migrant labor, religion, ethnicity, agricultural history, and gender. Written by former students of preeminent labor figure and historian David Montgomery, the works advance the argument that class remains indispensable to the study of working Americans and their place in the broad drama of our shared national history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Eric Arnesen is the James R. Hoffa Teamsters Professor of Modern American Labor History and Vice Dean for Faculty and Administration at George Washington University's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923. Julie Greene is a professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park and the the author of The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal. Bruce Laurie is a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists.
REVIEWS
"The best anthology of labor's past to be published in many years."--Michael Kazin, author of Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era
"David Montgomery has been the most important labor historian of our times. . . . In this superb collection, thirteen of his students repay their mentor with a set of sparkling essays that not only demonstrates the vast range of his influence but addresses the new political, cultural, and racial issues that define the axis upon which the study of labor history in the United States now turns."--Nelson Lichtenstein, author of Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface xi
Introduction 1 Julie Greene, Bruce Laurie, and Eric Arnesen
Part 1: Politics and the State
1. Land and Freedom: The New York Anti-Rent Wars and the Construction of Free Labor in the Antebellum North 19 Reeve Huston
2. The "Fair Field" of the "Middle Ground": Abolitionism, Labor Reform, and the Making of an Antislavery Bloc in Antebellum Masschusetts 45 Bruce Laurie
3. Dinner-Pail Politics: Employers, Workers, and Partisan Culture in the Progressive Era 71 Julie Greene
4. Class Wars: Frank Walsh, the Reformers, and the Crisis of Progressivism 97 Shelton Stromquist
5. The Workers' State: Municipal Policy, Class, and Taxes in the Early Depression 125 Cecelia F. Bucki
Part 2: Class and Culture
6. "Work That Body": African-American Women, Work, and Leisure in Atlanta and the New South 153 Tera W. Hunter
7. Mobilizing Community: Migrant Workers and the Politics of Labor Mobility in the North American West, 1900-1920 175 Gunther Peck
8. Popular Narrative and Working-Class Identity: Alexander Irvine's Early Twentieth-Century Literary Adventures 201 Kathryn J. Oberdeck
9. Making a Church Home: African-American Migrants, Religion, and Working-Class Activism 230 Kimberley L. Phillips
Part 3: Labor Activism and Workers' Organizations
10. "To Sit among Men": Skill, Gender, and raft Unionism in the Early American Federation of Labor 259 Ileen A. DeVault
11. Charting an Independent Course: African-American Railroad Workers in the World War 1 Era 284 Eric Arnesen
12. Boring from Within and Without: William Z. Foster, the Trade Union Educational League, and American Communism in the 1920s 209 James R. Barrett
13. The Dynamics of "Americanization": The Croatian Fraternal Union between the Wars, 1920s-30s 340 Peter Rachleff
Contributors 363
Index 367
