Labor History

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Esquire This revelatory and inclusive book “unearths the stories of the people—farm laborers, domestic workers, factory employees—behind some of the labor movement’s biggest successes” (The New York Times) from independent journalist...

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018 Named one of the “5 Books About Famous Strikes That Demonstrated the Historical Importance of Civil Disobedience” by Bustle “Loomis refuses to romanticize this period or the labor movement it produced. . . . What Loomis’s book perhaps does best is...

We work because we have to, but also because we like it: from hunting-gathering over 700,000 years ago to the present era of zoom meetings, humans have always worked to make the world around them serve their needs. Jan Lucassen provides an inclusive history of humanity's busy labor throughout the ages. Spanning China, India, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, Lucassen looks at the ways in which humanity organizes work: in the household, the tribe, the city, and the state. 

During the formative years of the Industrial Revolution, English workers and artisans claimed a place in society that would shape the following centuries. But the capitalist elite did not form the working class - the workers shaped their own creations, developing a shared identity in the process. Despite their lack of power and the indignity forced upon them by the upper classes, the working class emerged as England's greatest cultural and political force.

In this classic account, historian Philip Foner traces the radical history of black workers’ contribution to the American labor movement.

From before the dawn of the 20th century until the arrival of the New Deal, one of the most protracted and deadly labor struggles in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations whose millions bought armed guards and political influence. On the other side were 50,000 mine workers, the nation's largest labor union, and the legendary "miners' angel", Mother Jones.

On a spring morning in 1914, members of the United Mine Workers of America clashed with guards employed by the Rockefeller family, and a state militia beholden to Colorado's industrial barons. When the dust settled, nineteen men, women, and children among the miners' families lay dead. The strikers had killed at least thirty men, destroyed six mines, and laid waste to two company towns. Killing for Coal offers a bold and original perspective on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the "Great Coalfield War."

Longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year The "rich and gripping" true story of the first time machines came for human jobs—and how the Luddite uprising explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech and AI today (Naomi Klein) The most urgent story in modern tech begins...

Praised for its "impressive even-handedness", From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

From longtime labor organizer Jane McAlevey, a vital call-to-arms in favor of unions, a key force capable of defending our democracy. For decades, racism, corporate greed, and a skewed political system have been eating away at the social and political fabric of the United States. Yet as McAlevey...

A timely, in-depth, and vital exploration of the American labor movement and its critical place in our society and politics, from acclaimed labor reporter Hamilton Nolan. Inequality is America’s biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix it. Organized...

History remembers emperors, generals, and gods. But it quietly forgets the people who actually kept the world running. Behind every pyramid, palace, and empire was an entire class of workers doing the jobs no one else wanted—the dirty, dangerous, and deeply human work that made civilization possible. Human sponges cleaning Roman toilets. Children crawling through mines in suffocating darkness. Perfume makers stirring vats of animal fat and crushed flowers. Professional mourners hired to cry at funerals. This wasn’t the glamorous past. This was the real one. Dirty Jobs of the Ancient ...

This engrossing piece of undercover reportage has been a fixture on the New York Times best seller list since its publication. With nearly a million copies in print, Nickel and Dimed is a modern classic that deftly portrays the plight of America's working-class poor.

Wealth, Freedom, and Markets: Exploring the Economic Ideas of Adam Smith Discover the timeless wisdom of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, in this clear and engaging exploration of his most influential ideas. From the revolutionary arguments of The Wealth of Nations to the moral insights of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, this book unpacks Smith’s vision of how markets, morality, and society work together to create prosperity. Inside, you’ll learn how Smith’s analysis of the division of labor transformed our understanding of productivity, why his critique of mercantilism ...

In this span between armistice and depression, Americans were kicking up their heels, but they were also bringing about major changes in the social and political structure of their country. Only Yesterday is a fond, witty, penetrating biography of this restless decade, a delightful reminiscence for those who can remember and a fascinating firsthand look for those who've only heard.

On January 20, 1942, fifteen men arrived for a meeting in a luxurious villa on the shores of the Wannsee in the far-western outskirts of Berlin. They came at the invitation of Reinhard Heydrich and were almost all high-ranking Nazi Party, government, and SS officials. But the beauty of the situation stood in stark contrast to the purpose of the meeting to which the fifteen had come in January 1942: the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

For readers of Stamped and An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People, Albert J. Mann’s Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States is an accessible and comprehensive YA history of the way the labor movement has shaped America and how it intersects with...

A Sweeping History Of British Columbia British Columbia defies easy summary. It is a place of staggering natural beauty and deep human contradiction — a province built on Indigenous land without treaty or consent, enriched by the labour of people it then tried to exclude, and shaped by conflicts between capital and workers that were fiercer here than almost anywhere else in Canada. It is also a place of genuine breakthrough: of land claims won after a century of struggle, of radical unions that changed what workers could demand, of environmental movements that began on a Vancouver ...

The Histories Of Kansas, Michigan & Minnesota In One Collected Volume The American Midwest defies simple definition. It is heartland and flyover country, progressive birthplace and conservative stronghold, agricultural Eden and industrial powerhouse. In this first volume of his ambitious survey of the Midwestern states, Daniel Hardy examines three states whose histories illuminate the contradictions and complexities that define the region and the nation itself. From the Indigenous nations who first called these lands home to the waves of immigrants who transformed them, from wheat fields ...

In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks boldly challenges the presupposition that work, or waged labor, is inherently a social and political good. Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation.