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This book charts the reactions of prominent American writers to the unprecedented prosperity of the decades following World War II. It begins with an examination of Lewis Mumford's wartime call for “democratic” consumption and concludes with an analysis of the origins of President Jimmy Carter's “malaise” speech of 1979. Between these bookends, Daniel Horowitz documents a broad range of competing views, each in its own way reflective of a deep-seated ambivalence toward consumer culture.

Black people have been on a continual search for freedom. Since their arrival in the West as exploited sources of labor, through the great migrations out of and back to the U.S. South, to repatriation efforts to Africa and throughout the Diaspora, they have been longing for place and to find or create a Mecca.

The Black Mecca Blueprint examines the current Black Mecca, Atlanta, Georgia.  Jonathan Grant explores the dynamism of Black life in a “Black city,” homing in on race, class, and place and all their inherent complexities. He analyzes the ways place and city spaces are negotiated through power and class struggles and how various spaces, such as the Atlanta University Center and its reputation as a beacon, are recreated.

Drawing on in-depth interviews, hip hop music, cultural podcasts, stand-up comedy, archival research, media, autoethnographic data, and historiography, The Black Mecca Blueprint captures the beauty and burden of Atlanta while creating a blueprint that can be used to help devise more democratic cities across the U.S. and around the world. 

A meticulous examination of the history and roots of economic inequality within the United States.

This volume refines and extends the economic history literature on economic inequality in the United States. Economic inequality manifests itself on various dimensions, including access to resources and economic security, as well as access to education and opportunities for migration, marriage, and other important life decisions. Measuring inequality and studying its variation over time and in response to economic shocks such as recessions and wars deepen our understanding of how the economy operates and can inform the design of public policies. The studies in this compendium present comprehensive evidence on income distribution during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on new data on wages and prices. They also consider disparities in economic well-being that are reflected in outcomes other than wage and salary income, such as homeownership and marriage. The volume also presents new evidence on the effects of income inequality on social outcomes. It concludes with an intellectual history of “human capital,” a core concept in the economic analysis of the underpinnings of labor market inequality.

This groundbreaking historical account documents the little-known but significant conflict that erupted among Maine lobstermen in the 1950s—a pivotal clash that pitted independent small-scale fishermen against powerful dealers and federal government regulators. Written by distinguished historian Ronald P. Formisano, this work reconstructs a dramatic struggle over prices and economic power within Maine's vital lobster fishery.

Capturing the reality of the Lobster War strike and its subsequent legal proceedings, Formisano's narrative explores how independent owner-operators of the Maine lobster fishery, facing economic pressures from middlemen dealers and federal intervention, banded together in a coordinated effort to secure fair prices and maintain control over their livelihoods. 

Through meticulous historical research, Formisano illuminates the economic realities of commercial fishing, the dynamics between laborers and processors, and the role of government regulation in shaping resource management policies.The Great Lobster War serves as both a detailed historical study and an accessible story of working-class agency and collective action in the postwar era.

The Home in Hollywood Melodrama considers the home’s narrative, thematic, and visual construction within domestic melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s, exploring the assumptions of gender, class, and race through which the home is visualized on screen. Informed by approaches from genre studies, architectural and urban studies, feminist film theory, critical race theory, and phenomenology, amongst others, the book traces how routine domestic activities and unremarkable stylistic gestures become charged with meaning via melodrama’s emphasis on recurrence and return and its moral elevation of victimhood. Drawing on original archival research and detailed textual analysis, The Home in Hollywood Melodrama offers a series of detailed case studies that explore the onscreen home as a product of both Hollywood production norms and wider cultural conceptions of belonging. Addressing questions of female movement and labor, property relations and class, race, and national identity, the book argues that the generic structures of domestic melodrama are fundamental to understanding how the home within these films takes shape onscreen.

Oral histories of many of the last generation of Lowell, MA, textile mill workers preceded by two introductory sections. The first presents the historic setting of economic development and subsequent decline of the textile industry in Lowell. The second is a brief explanation of the production process wherein the last generation of mill workers expended so many of their skills and so much of their energy.

Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler edit a collection that examines the effects of the pandemic on workers. Sections of the book focus on specific impacts and government efforts to restructure the economy; the dramatic effect of the pandemic on the hospitality industry; educators’ response on behalf of themselves and their students; frontline healthcare workers; and the innovative forms of labor organizing that emerged during and after COVID.

Contributors: Carlos Aramayo, Kathleen Brown, Sandrine Etienne, Ismael García-Colón, Puya Gerami, Maura Hagan, Connor Harney, Devan Hawkins, Leigh Howard, Marian Moser Jones, Doris Joy, Nick Juravich, Eric Larson, Kathryn M. Meyer, Samir Sonti, Steve Striffler, Lia Warner, Andrew B. Wolf, and Jennifer Zelnick

Uncovering Hollywood’s perpetual longing for a lost industrial America

“We don’t make things in America anymore”: like clockwork, this refrain resurfaces in political discourse, a reflection of yearning for a bygone era of industrial productivity. In his latest work, Grant Farred uses the 1990 film Pretty Woman to expose and critique this lingering nostalgia for late-industrial capitalism.

Situating Pretty Woman alongside Reagan-era films including Wall Street, Farred examines the congealment of such a pervasive romanticized view of the United States as a fading industrial powerhouse. Drawing on an eclectic range of thinkers—from Raymond Williams and Slavoj Žižek to Mick Jagger—The Prettiest Woman offers a unique analysis of the ways Hollywood perpetuates the myth of a lost “productive America,” highlighting the seductive power of this fantasy despite its disconnect from economic and political realities.

A collection of Mahasweta Devi's activist essays, reportage, and editorials on rural development and dispossession.  

What do India’s poorest communities reveal about power, land, and survival? In the late 1970s, writer Mahasweta Devi shifted her focus to the lives of Adivasi (Indigenous peoples of the Indian subcontinent) and Dalit communities in eastern India, especially Bihar and West Bengal. Traveling widely and staying with the communities she wrote about, she drew on these firsthand encounters in her writing. She also edited the Bengali quarterly Bortika, making the journal a space for peasants, laborers, workers, and other marginalized groups to speak for themselves.

The Slaves of Palamau and Other Writings brings together a representative selection from her activist prose of the 1980s and early 1990s, drawn from essays, reportage, and editorials. These pieces examine rural development; dispossession and land alienation; environmental damage; and the conditions of landless laborers, sharecroppers, bonded and contract workers, miners, and Indigenous communities, with the steady attention that also informs her fiction.

A critical analysis of historical and contemporary discourses around worklessness, economic inactivity, and the factors that contribute to people withdrawing from the conventional labor market. 

How do we define and respond to worklessness? This book combines analysis of media and political narratives around worklessness and factors that limit individuals’ capacity for conventional paid work—from disability and long-term illness to caring responsibilities—with interviews that shed light on the lived experience of so-called economic inactivity.

In dissecting popular portrayals of “the workless” in the present and tracing the historical evolution of discourses around “inactivity”—especially work-limiting disability—James Morrison draws heavily on sociological theories of stigma and symbolic annihilation. Conceptualising the contemporary narrative about the UK's supposed crisis in economic inactivity as the latest in a continuum of periodic moral panics about worklessness, he argues that neoliberal definitions of work and worklessness are too narrow, as they deny—and render invisible—the importance of various forms of unpaid labor performed by many people classified as “inactive,” notably informal caregiving and volunteering. 

David M. Struthers draws on the anarchist concept of affinity to explore the radicalism of Los Angeles's interracial working class from 1900 to 1930. Uneven economic development created precarious employment and living conditions for laborers. The resulting worker mobility led to coalitions that, inevitably, remained short lived. As Struthers shows, affinity helps us understand how individual cooperative actions shaped and reshaped these alliances. It also reveals social practices of resistance that are often too unstructured or episodic for historians to capture. What emerges is an untold history of Los Angeles and a revolutionary movement that, through myriad successes and failures, produced powerful examples of racial cooperation.

In this lively and engaging book, Andrew L. Yarrow tells the story of a national movement that promoted an amalgam of values and practices ranging from self-control, money management, and efficiency to conservation, generosity, and planning for the future—all under the rubric of “thrift.” Emerging in tandem and in tension with the first flowerings of consumer society, the thrift movement flourished during the 1910s and 1920s and then lingered on the outskirts of American culture from the Depression to the prosperous mid-twentieth century.

The movement brought together a diverse array of social actors with widely divergent agendas—the YMCA, the Boy and Girl Scouts, temperance crusaders, and others seeking to strengthen the moral fiber of urban young men and boys in particular, and to tamp down the appeal of radicalism. It also attracted credit union and other progressive activists wanting to empower the working class economically, bankers desiring to broaden their customer base, conservationists and efficiency proponents denouncing “waste,” and government leaders, school teachers, and economists who believed that encouraging saving was in the economic interests of both individuals and the nation.

A post–World War II culture that centered on spending and pleasure made the early-twentieth-century thrift messages seem outdated. Nonetheless, echoes of thrift can be found in currently popular ideas of “sustainability,” “stewardship,” and “simplicity” and in efforts to curtail public and private debt.

Gold Winner in the Death & Dying Category of the Nautilus Book Awards 

Winner of the 2025 Book Excellence Awards in the Death and Dying Category

Silver Winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards in the Humanities and Societal Issues categories

Best Nonfiction Book in TalkDeath's Reader Choice Awards

CALIBA Golden Poppy Award Finalist — Nonfiction category

Death is the great equalizer, but not all deaths are created equal. In recent years, there has been an increased interest and advocacy concerning end-of-life and after-death care. An increasing number of individuals and organizations from health care to the funeral and death care industries are working to promote and encourage people to consider their end-of-life wishes. Yet, there are limits to who these efforts reach and who can access such resources. These conversations come from a place of good intentions, but also from a place of privilege.

Too Poor to Die: The Hidden Realities of Dying in the Margins, a collection of closely connected essays, takes the reader on a journey into what happens to those who die while experiencing homelessness or who end up indigent or unclaimed at the end of life. Too Poor to Die bears witness to the disparities in death and dying faced by some of society’s most vulnerable and marginalized and asks the reader to consider their own end-of-life and disposition plans within the larger context of how privilege and access plays a role in what we want versus what we get in death.