Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"The best anthology of labor's past to be published in many years."--Michael Kazin, author of
Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era"David Montgomery has been the most important labor historian of our times. . . . In this superb collection, thirteen of his students repay their mentor with a set of sparkling essays that not only demonstrates the vast range of his influence but addresses the new political, cultural, and racial issues that define the axis upon which the study of labor history in the United States now turns."--Nelson Lichtenstein, author of
Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in DetroitTable of ContentsPreface xi
Introduction 1
Julie Greene, Bruce Laurie, and Eric Arnesen Part 1: Politics and the State
1. Land and Freedom: The New York Anti-Rent Wars and the Construction of Free Labor in the Antebellum North 19
Reeve Huston 2. The "Fair Field" of the "Middle Ground": Abolitionism, Labor Reform, and the Making of an Antislavery Bloc in Antebellum Masschusetts 45
Bruce Laurie 3. Dinner-Pail Politics: Employers, Workers, and Partisan Culture in the Progressive Era 71
Julie Greene 4. Class Wars: Frank Walsh, the Reformers, and the Crisis of Progressivism 97
Shelton Stromquist 5. The Workers' State: Municipal Policy, Class, and Taxes in the Early Depression 125
Cecelia F. Bucki Part 2: Class and Culture
6. "Work That Body": African-American Women, Work, and Leisure in Atlanta and the New South 153
Tera W. Hunter 7. Mobilizing Community: Migrant Workers and the Politics of Labor Mobility in the North American West, 1900-1920 175
Gunther Peck 8. Popular Narrative and Working-Class Identity: Alexander Irvine's Early Twentieth-Century Literary Adventures 201
Kathryn J. Oberdeck 9. Making a Church Home: African-American Migrants, Religion, and Working-Class Activism 230
Kimberley L. Phillips Part 3: Labor Activism and Workers' Organizations
10. "To Sit among Men": Skill, Gender, and raft Unionism in the Early American Federation of Labor 259
Ileen A. DeVault 11. Charting an Independent Course: African-American Railroad Workers in the World War 1 Era 284
Eric Arnesen 12. Boring from Within and Without: William Z. Foster, the Trade Union Educational League, and American Communism in the 1920s 209
James R. Barrett 13. The Dynamics of "Americanization": The Croatian Fraternal Union between the Wars, 1920s-30s 340
Peter Rachleff Contributors 363
Index 367
