Synopses & Reviews
This comprehensive compilation of documents integrates institutional labor history (movements and trade unions) with aspects of social and cultural history. It charts changes in trade union and managerial practices and integrates the economics and politics of labor history. An impressive array of documents details household as well as industrial relations; women as domestic workers, unpaid household labor, and factory workers; African American, Hispanic American (especially Mexican and Mexican American), Asian and white workers. It offers readers insight into the full historical spectrum of workers, their daily lives, and the movements that they created.
Review
"
American Labor: A Documentary History is an outstanding collection of materials drawn from a wide variety of sources. Responsive to the themes of gender and ethnicity that have characterized much recent scholarship, this collection by two leading labor historians does not neglect more traditional themes of union organizing, collective bargaining, and government-labor relations. The editors' introductory commentaries provide clearly rendered context for the well-chosen selections that form the heart of this book. While A
merican Labor: A Documentary History is sure to find wide use in classes, it also provides a rich trove of primary material for general readers, much of it in the form of poignant and moving personal testimony from workers of diverse backgrounds."-- Robert H. Zieger, Distinguished Professor of History, University of Florida
"At long last we now have a reliable, comprehensive, and accessible volume of documents on the history of American labor from two of the most respected labor historians in the academy. This volume actually does justice to the very diverse field that is labor history today: no small accomplishment!"--Eric Arnesen, University of Illinois at Chicago and author of Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality
About the Author
Melvyn Dubofsky is Bartle Distinguished Professor of History & Sociology, Binghamton University, SUNY. He is recipient of Fellowships from the ACLS, American Philosophical Society, and NEH and author of numerous books and essays in history, including: W
hen Workers Organize: New York City in the Progressive Era;
We Shall Be All: A History of the IWW;
Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865-1920 (Three Editions, 1975-1996);
John L. Lewis: A biography;
"Big Bill" Haywood; The State and Labor in Modern America; Hard Work: The Making of Labor History.Joseph McCartin is Associate Professor of History, Georgetown University. He is author of Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-21, which won the 1999 Taft Prize for Outstanding Book in U.S. Labor History.
Table of Contents
Introduction * Labor in the Colonial and Early National Periods, to 1828 * The Rise of Free Labor, the Factory System, and Trades Organization, 1828-1877 * Workers in a Maturing an Industrial Society, 1877-1914 * Wars, Depression, and the Struggle for Industrial Democracy, 1912-1947 * The Era of the Postwar Social Contract, 1947-1973 * Era of Economic Change and Union Decline, Since 1973