I’ve been fascinated by how ordinary people can change the course of their own lives since I was a child. However, I had no idea until later in life that there were entire fields of study devoted to understanding how this process works historically. When I discovered “new labor history” many years ago, I knew I wanted to be part of it. It was the privilege of a lifetime to study under some of the best labor historians in the world at the University of Chicago. And I can’t describe how I felt when my dissertation won the Herbert Gutman Prize in Labor History. I hope these books spark your interest!
I wrote
Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism
There are few scholarly books I consider quasi-sacred. Books that changed the course of my thinking and set me on my current path. The ones I have memorized lines from and keep handy at all times. E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class is one of those books.
His theories of working-class consciousness transformed my understanding of what “class” is in the first place. The colorful artisans, craftsmen, and makers of the pre-industrial era found themselves caught between worlds as their crafts and traditions were dying.
The way they demanded dignity and a decent life as the ravages of industrial capitalism overtook their society is nothing short of inspiring. Thompson’s passion for rescuing these individuals from the “enormous condescension of posterity” gets me every time.
Fifty years since first publication, E. P. Thompson's revolutionary account of working-class culture and ideals is published in Penguin Modern Classics, with a new introduction by historian Michael Kenny
This classic and imaginative account of working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, revolutionized our understanding of English social history. E. P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making and re-creates the whole-life experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation, and who yet created a cultured and political consciousness of great vitality.
I’ve always been a sucker for a good labor strike.
But a labor strike of Black women in the South—only a decade removed from slavery—demanding dignity, equality, and a living wage so they could simply “enjoy their freedom” in a region where a rich, white, slaveholding regime was just recently toppled? That’s next-level stuff.
Hunter tells the story of this Black female majority who worked in domestic labor in the years following the Civil War. Can you imagine going to work as a wage-earning domestic laborer in the home of your former owner? And then collectively organizing to demand that “freedom” actually means something in this godforsaken region?
Come for the organized labor protests. Stay for the moment these women pack their bags and move to the North seeking the joy and pleasure they deserve.
As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta--the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south--in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization.
New Orleans has always been one of my favorite cities to visit.
Beyond the beignets and parades, did you know this gorgeous city also has a colorful and vibrant labor history that united Black and white waterfront workers in solidarity against wealthy capitalists? I didn’t know until I read Arnesen’s masterful book.
I remember staying up all night to finish it in grad school and being forever shaped by the dynamic stories of immigrants, Black migrants, and their children performing the waterfront labor that kept the cotton, sugar, and other goods flowing at the New Orleans port. I keep this biracial, waterfront labor movement in my heart right alongside the beignets and jazz.
This is an account of the New Orleans dockworkers and their formation of an inter-racial labour movement from 1880 to 1894, and again from 1901 to 1923. After the Civil War, Louisiana had no social group that exercised a clear and sustained cultural and political hegemony over the others, and sharp conflicts over racial and class issues marked the struggle for political control. This was particularly acute in New Orleans, which had what was in effect a long-standing black middle class. These free people of colour, along with ex-slaves under their guidance, fostered legislation that dismantled the segregated streetcar system…
Let’s face it. Christianity has been used to support slavery, encourage white people to be racist, and send women back to the 1950s.
That’s why I found Jarod Roll’s Spirit of Rebellion refreshing and important. It was a good reminder that faith can also provide the moral courage necessary for change. It can unite people instead of dividing them.
I can’t imagine a place and time more disposed to racist divisions than rural Missouri in the late 19th century. Yet, poor white and Black farmers there found common ground as rebels against the emerging capitalist order. How? Through the Pentecostal revivals that swept the region in this same period. If that’s not a message of hope in these trying times, then I don’t know what is.
Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association
In Spirit of Rebellion, Jarod Roll documents an alternative tradition of American protest by linking working-class political movements to grassroots religious revivals. He reveals how ordinary rural citizens in the south used available resources and their shared faith to defend their agrarian livelihoods amid the political and economic upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century.
On the frontier of the New Cotton South in Missouri's Bootheel, the relationships between black and white farmers were complicated by racial tensions and bitter competition. Despite these divisions,…
When kids stick it to the (adult) rich capitalists, it just hits different.
I reviewed this outstanding book by Vincent DiGirolamo after it had won multiple awards in 2020. It is deserving of all the accolades and then some. I learned that across America, newsboys weren’t just the purveyors of the news but they actively shaped American history, the urban landscape, and working-class identity.
I found it inspiring that these kids stoked the flames of working-class anger as they cried out the news of labor strikes and organized dozens themselves. This book was a great reminder that we have to include children and young people in the quest to rescue forgotten voices from the “enormous condescension of posterity.”
From Benjamin Franklin to Ragged Dick to Jack Kelly, hero of the Disney musical Newsies, newsboys have long intrigued Americans as symbols of struggle and achievement. But what do we really know about the children who hawked and delivered newspapers in American cities and towns? Who were they? What was their life like? And how important was their work to the development of a free press, the survival of poor families, and the shaping of their own attitudes, values and beliefs?
Crying the News: A History of America's Newsboys offers an epic retelling of the American experience from the perspective…
Did you know that child labor was a hotly contested issue for more than 80 years of American history? My book uncovers the story of how disagreements over child labor broke down along sectional lines between the North and South. In the decades after the Civil War, an organized movement to end the practice of child labor emerged in the North. However, Southern industrialists who were determined to transform the Southern economy sparked an opposition movement that was just as organized. Although the movement to end child labor secured a legal victory with the 1938 passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, fundamental disagreements about free market capitalism, labor, the role of government in American life, and parental rights were never resolved.
The plan was insane. The trap seemed to snap shut on Bruce and Maggie Tate, an isolation forced on them by the pandemic and America's growing political factionalism. Something had to change.
Maggie's surprising answer: buy a boat, learn to pilot it, and embark on the Great Loop. With no experience, and knowing little about seafaring, diesel motors, or navigation, Maggie, Bruce, and the family dog decided to take on the six-thousand-mile journey down inland rivers, around the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, and across the Great Lakes. They would have to navigate canals, rivers, seas, and locks. But along the…
Currently Away: How Two Disenchanted People Traveled the Great Loop for Nine Months and Returned to the Start, Energized and Optimistic
