Fans pick 77 books like The Last Great Strike

Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water is a tremendously important once-in-a-lifetime study of the Attica prison insurrection in 1971.

At 752 pages, it is investigative and cinematically written, making it one of the most fundamental new works on the American carceral state. The research that went into this book also renders it uniquely significant.

It is rare that a historian can merge such profound and complete analysis with richly detailed storytelling without either suffering. Blood in the Water has raised the bar on studies of the carceral state and permanently advanced our understanding of the ecosystem of prison control and protest. 

Having long wondered about how our world has been shaped by such commodities as tea, coffee, and sugar, I was fascinated by this carefully researched study of how cotton has shaped our world since the first cotton clothing 5,000 years ago in (what is now called) Pakistan.

The great thing about this book is its global reach, following cotton around the world as folks learned how to use it. While this is serious academic research, the author’s ability to relate local lives and key individuals to the broader forces shaping the globalizing cotton market keeps the story humming along.

I learned how British military power was key to Britain’s ability to relocate the global heart of cotton textile production from India to Manchester, boosting European wealth by deindustrializing India—a reminder that who wins and loses crucially depends on political power, not just market forces.

One of Zinn’s great insights that still inspires readers today is that there are all these histories of struggle that do not get taught. Not even Zinn could explore all of them. In the last four decades, historians have uncovered amazing tales of struggle in the face of incredible oppression.

Today, even as we pay more attention to the history of American racism than ever before, we do not learn nearly enough about Native American history. What we do learn is often far in the past. But Native Americans continue to fight for their rights today. Blansett’s biography of Richard Oakes, who led the Alcatraz takeover in 1969, will open up an entirely new history for you, one that demonstrates that we cannot understand modern American history without placing the Native struggle for sovereignty and power at the center of it.

This is a book that inspired me as a historian and in my approach to activism. Barbara Ransby’s biography of Ella Baker excavates the activist’s life, placing the reader at the nexus of some of the most important moments in civil rights history. Ella Baker’s life also provides a blueprint for local activism and group-centered leadership. It’s a compelling story of how Ella Baker became a mentor, inspiring, listening to, and supporting local activists. 

Did you know that until 1974, the job category ‘domestic worker’ was excluded from labor rights that were established in FDR’s New Deal legislation such as the minimum wage and workers’ compensation? Did you know that 1960s union leaders ignored the exploitative labor conditions of domestic work because they considered these workers “unorganizable”?

Historian Premilla Nadasan’s wonderful book tells the story of Black domestic workers’ exclusion from legal rights to which other workers were entitled and their fight to gain those rights beginning in the 1950s and extending through the establishment of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974.

Telling this history through the life stories of domestic workers who were leaders in this movement makes this book a particularly compelling and worthwhile read.  

Dalton was a wonderful poet and radical activist tragically executed by his Salvadorean comrades in 1975 when they erroneously believed him to be working for the CIA. The Salvadorean left has a poor record in devouring its own in bouts of paranoia that attended the civil war of the 1980s. Marmol, who survived deep into old age, was a ringleader of an uprising in 1932 that briefly promised a peasant overthrow of a state controlled by an oligarchy of a dozen families. The uprising was repressed with such force that the military was able to retain political power for the next four decades. This book is beautifully written and translated wonderfully well by Richard Schaaf and Kathleen Ross.

The literature on Cesar Chavez, the United Farm Workers, and their boycott campaigns is quite extensive. Matt Garcia’s is one of the best accounts of the Farm Workers’ strategy of boycotting grapes, lettuce, and other items to build power and win a union. What I especially appreciate about Garcia’s account is, first, his focus on the innovations in consumer activism brought about by the UFW. Organizers and workers made their boycott succeed by going into cities, living together in boycott houses, and appealing to urban consumers. Garcia’s accounts of boycott houses and organizers’ efforts from Los Angeles to Toronto and London are excellent. Second, Garcia doesn’t stray from critiquing the boycott tactic and noting places where it fell short – making this a cautionary tale for activists today.

This is not only a great ethnography (a book based on long-term anthropological fieldwork) giving a splendidly detailed and deeply humane account of the lives of Bolivian tin miners and their families in the 1970s, but also one of the most effective case studies within the framework of “dependency theory.”

The title, which comes from one of the author’s interviews with a miner, captures the violence and misery of tin mining, but I also love the way the book portrays its protagonists as ordinary people living and giving meaning to their lives as best they can. 

Workers ignoring the authority of foremen, organizing disruptive checker-board strikes—only those whose names started with a certain letter put down tools, but enough to bring work to a halt—forming alliances with rebellious students and battling the police in the streets: that’s the story of Italy around 1968, the place of some of the most radical and imaginative protests in the post-war era.

What workers demanded was as simple as it was radical: we want everything. Nanni Balestrini’s novel by the same title memorializes these struggles. It achieves what few sober historical accounts can: vividly capturing the dull monotony of labor suffocating young workers and the thrill of agitation on the shop floor and rebellion in the streets. 

I have long been a fan of stories about courageous women and I love it when I discover a book for young readers that brings to life an inspiring story of someone they may not know well (or at all). That’s exactly what Warren does in this book about Delores Huerta. The text works well for even the youngest readers. It promotes empathy by describing the poor living conditions of migrant children and their parents. Its themes are as relevant today as they were in Delores’ time. We need to care, we need to stand up for others, we need to be fair. It’s beautifully illustrated, too.