Labor Histories

by Eric Arnesen

• ISBN13: 9780252024078
• ISBN10: 0252024079
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2022-10-17
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Summary

Is class outmoded as a basis for understanding labor history? This significant new collection emphatically says "No!" Touching on such subjects as migrant labor, religion, ethnicity, agricultural history, and gender, these thirteen essays by former students of David Montgomery -- a preeminent leader in labor circles as well as in academia -- demonstrate the sheer diversity of the field today.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
Introduction	1	(18)
JULIE GREENE
BRUCE LAURIE
ERIC ARNESEN
Part I: Politics and the State	19	(134)
1. Land and Freedom: The New York Anti-Rent Wars and the Construction of Free Labor in the Antebellum North	19	(26)
REEVE HUSTON
2. The "Fair Field" of the "Middle Ground": Abolitionism, Labor Reform, and the Making of an Antislavery Bloc in Antebellum Massachusetts	45	(26)
BRUCE LAURIE
3. Dinner-Pail Politics: Employers, Workers, and Partisan Culture in the Progressive Era	71	(26)
JULIE GREENE
4. Class Wars: Frank Walsh, the Reformers, and the Crisis of Progressivism	97	(28)
SHELTON STROMQUIST
5. The Workers' State: Municipal Policy, Class, and Taxes in the Early Depression	125	(28)
CECELIA F. BUCKI
Part 2: Class and Culture	153	(106)
6. "Work That Body": African-American Women, Work, and Leisure in Atlanta and the New South	153	(22)
TERA W. HUNTER
7. Mobilizing Community: Migrant Workers and the Politics of Labor Mobility in the North American West, 1900-1920	175	(26)
GUNTHER PECK
8. Popular Narrative and Working-Class Identity: Alexander Irvine's Early Twentieth-Century Literary Adventures	201	(29)
KATHRYN J. OBERDECK
9. Making a Church Home: African-American Migrants, Religion, and Working-Class Activism	230	(29)
KIMBERLEY L. PHILLIPS
Part 3: Labor Activism and Workers' Organizations	259	(104)
10. "To Sit among Men": Skill, Gender, and Craft Unionism in the Early American Federation of Labor	259	(25)
ILEEN A. DEVAULT
11. Charting an Independent Course: African-American Railroad Workers in the World War I Era	284	(25)
ERIC ARNESEN
12. Boring from Within and Without: William Z. Foster, the Trade Union Educational League, and American Communism in the 1920s	309	(31)
JAMES R. BARRETT
13. The Dynamics of "Americanization": The Croatian Fraternal Union between the Wars, 1920s-30s	340	(23)
PETER RACHLEFF
Contributors	363	(4)
Index	367