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.
Preface 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
