Is class outmoded as a basis for understanding labor history? This collection emphatically answers, "No!" These thirteen essays delve into subjects like migrant labor, religion, ethnicity, agricultural history, and gender. Written by former students of preeminent labor figure and historian David Montgomery, the works advance the argument that class remains indispensable to the study of working Americans and their place in the broad drama of our shared national history.

A RUSA 2007 Outstanding Reference TitleThe Encyclopedia of US Labor and Working-Class History provides sweeping coverage of US labor history. Containing over 650 entries, the Encyclopedia encompasses labor history from the colonial era to the present. Articles focus on states, regions, periods, economic sectors and occupations, race-relations, ethnicity, and religion, concepts and developments in labor economics, environmentalism, globalization, legal history, tra...

From the time the first tracks were laid in the early nineteenth century, the railroad has occupied a crucial place in America's historical imagination. Now, for the first time, Eric Arnesen gives us an untold piece of that vital American institution--the story of African Americans on the railroad. African Americans have been a part of the railroad from its inception, but today they are largely remembered as Pullman porters and track layers. The real history is far richer, a tale of endles...

The United States that entered the twentieth century was vastly different from the nation that emerged from the Civil War. Industrialization, mass immigration, the growing presence of women in the work force, and the rapid advance of the cities had transformed American society.Broad in scope, The Gilded Age brings together sixteen original essays that offer lively syntheses of modern scholarship while making their own interpretive arguments. These engaging pieces allow students to ...

Born out of violence and the aspirations of its early settlers, the United States of America has become one of the world's most powerful nations. The book begins in colonial America as the first Europeans arrived, lured by the promise of financial profit, driven by religious piety and accompanied by diseases which would ravage the native populations. It explores the tensions inherent in a country built on slave labour in the name of liberty, one forced to assert its unity and reassess its ...

Guess what? The Indians didn’t save the Pilgrims from starvation by teaching them to grow corn. Thomas Jefferson thought states’ rights—an idea reviled today—were even more important than the Constitution’s checks and balances. The “Wild” West was more peaceful and a lot safer than most modern cities. And the biggest scandal of the Clinton years didn’t involve an intern in a blue dress.Surprised? Don’t be. In America, where history is riddled with misrepresentations, misunderstandi...

Many people were elated when Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in May 1954, the ruling that struck down state-sponsored racial segregation in America's public schools. Thurgood Marshall, chief attorney for the black families that launched the litigation, exclaimed later, "I was so happy, I was numb." The novelist Ralph Ellison wrote, "another battle of the Civil War has been won. The rest is up to us and I'm very glad. What a wonderful ...

The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multivolume history of the American nation. In the newest volume in the series, The Republic for Which It Stands, acclaimed historian Richard White offers a fresh and integrated interpretation of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as the seedbed of modern America. At the end of the Civil War the leaders and citizens of the victorious North envisioned the country's future as a free-labor republic, with a homogeno...

The Progressive Era, a few brief decades around the turn of the last century, still burns in American memory for its outsized personalities: Theodore Roosevelt, whose energy glinted through his pince-nez; Carry Nation, who smashed saloons with her axe and helped stop an entire nation from drinking; women suffragists, who marched in the streets until they finally achieved the vote; Andrew Carnegie and the super-rich, who spent unheard-of sums of money and became the wealthiest class...

“The American taxpayer”—angered by government waste and satisfied only with spending cuts—has preoccupied elected officials and political commentators since the Reagan Revolution. But resistance to progressive taxation has older, deeper roots. American Tax Resisters presents the full history of the American anti-tax movement that has defended the pursuit of limited taxes on wealth and battled efforts to secure social justice through income redistribution for the past 150 years.

**“A gripping and forceful narrative.”—Nancy F. Cott, author of Public VowsAn “enthralling” (Michael Kazin, Washington Post) account of America’s shift from a rural and agrarian society to an urban and industrial society.**In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technological innovation made possible dramatic increases in industrial and agricultural productivity; by 1919, per capita gross national product had soared. But this new wealth and n...

Simple Justice is the definitive history of the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education and the epic struggle for racial equality in this country. Combining intensive research with original interviews with surviving participants, Richard Kluger provides the fullest possible view of the human and legal drama in the years before 1954, the cumulative assaults on the white power structure that defended segregation, and the step-by-step establishment of a team of ins...