Description
Book SynopsisCity of Workers, City of Struggle brings together essays by leading historians of New York and a wealth of illustrations, offering rich descriptions of work, life, and political struggle. It recounts how workers have built formal and informal groups not only to advance their own interests but also to pursue a vision of what the city should be.
Trade ReviewCity of Workers, City of Struggle reveals how early colonists, later immigrants, and rural migrants became central to New York City’s manufacturing, trading, and financial industries. Evocatively illustrated, each chapter offers tales of mobilization and resistance experienced by diverse and ever-changing populations of New Yorkers. Together these chapters provide powerful insights into the interdependence of labor and capital. -- Alice Kessler-Harris, coeditor of
Democracy and the Welfare State: The Two Wests in the Age of AusterityWritten by some of the country's most talented historians, this lavishly illustrated and impressively argued book inverts the usual pattern of viewing New York City's history from the point of view of the rich and powerful. It makes clear that the struggles of workers—artisans and domestic laborers, sailors and garment workers, public employees and men and women in health care—were essential to making New York a bastion of progressivism. No account of history could be more relevant to our current moment. -- Eric Foner, Columbia University
At last! A pathbreaking history of New York laborers that runs from colonial-era artisans and slaves to today’s alt-labor organizers. Broadly conceived, it covers not only craft and industrial and white collar workers, but home workers, maritime workers, public workers, sex workers, health care workers, domestic workers, and criminals in the underground economy. It attends not only to unionization, but to the evolving nature of work, housing, leisure, politics, and culture. Vividly written, and copiously illustrated,
City of Workers, City of Struggle is a superb and timely introduction to Gotham’s working people, past and present. -- Mike Wallace, coauthor of
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898A richly illustrated work . . . in 16 well-written chapters, various scholars trace labor's role from the Colonial era through the rise of a new contemporary militant labor movement. * Choice *
Table of ContentsDirector’s Foreword, by Whitney W. Donhauser
Introduction: Workers’ Movements, Workers’ Struggles in New York, by Sarah M. Henry
Workers in the City of Commerce: 1624–18981. Artisan Labor in Colonial New York and the New Republic, by Simon Middleton
2. Slave Labor in New York, by Leslie M. Harris
3. Sailors Ashore in New York’s Sailortown, by Johnathan Thayer
4. Housework and Homework in 19th-Century New York City, by Elizabeth Blackmar
5. Victims, B’hoys, Foreigners, Slave-Drivers, and Despots: Picturing Work, Workers, and Activism in 19th-Century New York, by Joshua Brown
Union City: 1898–1975 6. The Needle Trades and the Uprising of Women Workers: 1905–1919, by Annelise Orleck
7. Sex Work and the Underground Economy, by LaShawn Harris
8. Here Comes the CIO, by Joshua B. Freeman
9. Puerto Rican Workers and the Struggle for Decent Lives in New York City: 1910s–1970s, by Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago
10. Labor and the Fight for Racial Equality, by Martha Biondi
11. Public Workers, by William A. Herbert
Crisis and Transformation: 1975– 201812. The Fiscal Crisis and Union Decline, by Kim Phillips-Fein
13. Health-care Workers and Union Power, by Brian Greenberg
14. Chinatown, the Garment and Restaurant Industries, and Labor, by Kenneth J. Guest and Margaret M. Chin
15. Domestic Workers, by Premilla Nadasen
16. New Forms of Struggle: The “Alt-labor” Movement in New York City, by Ruth Milkman
Conclusion: How Labor Shaped New York and New York Shaped Labor, by Joshua B. Freeman
For Further Reading
Index
Image Credits
