Labor Histories

Eric Arnesen is the James R. Hoffa Teamsters Professor of Modern American Labor History and Vice Dean for Faculty and Administration at George Washington University's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923. Julie Greene is a professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park and the the author of The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal. Bruce Laurie is a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists.

"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 Detroit

• Preface xiIntroduction 1 Julie Greene, Bruce Laurie, and Eric ArnesenPart 1: Politics and the State1. Land and Freedom: The New York Anti-Rent Wars and the Construction of Free Labor in the Antebellum North 19 Reeve Huston2. The "Fair Field" of the "Middle Ground": Abolitionism, Labor Reform, and the Making of an Antislavery Bloc in Antebellum Masschusetts 45 Bruce Laurie3. Dinner-Pail Politics: Employers, Workers, and Partisan Culture in the Progressive Era 71 Julie Greene4. Class Wars: Frank Walsh, the Reformers, and the Crisis of Progressivism 97 Shelton Stromquist5. The Workers' State: Municipal Policy, Class, and Taxes in the Early Depression 125 Cecelia F. BuckiPart 2: Class and Culture6. "Work That Body": African-American Women, Work, and Leisure in Atlanta and the New South 153 Tera W. Hunter7. Mobilizing Community: Migrant Workers and the Politics of Labor Mobility in the North American West, 1900-1920 175 Gunther Peck8. Popular Narrative and Working-Class Identity: Alexander Irvine's Early Twentieth-Century Literary Adventures 201 Kathryn J. Oberdeck9. Making a Church Home: African-American Migrants, Religion, and Working-Class Activism 230 Kimberley L. PhillipsPart 3: Labor Activism and Workers' Organizations10. "To Sit among Men": Skill, Gender, and raft Unionism in the Early American Federation of Labor 259 Ileen A. DeVault11. Charting an Independent Course: African-American Railroad Workers in the World War 1 Era 284 Eric Arnesen12. Boring from Within and Without: William Z. Foster, the Trade Union Educational League, and American Communism in the 1920s 209 James R. Barrett13. The Dynamics of "Americanization": The Croatian Fraternal Union between the Wars, 1920s-30s 340 Peter RachleffContributors 363Index 367