AMERICAN WORKING CLASS HISTORY-select list

This is very uneven, some areas are well-covered, others are sorely in need of update or organization. Most are books, and organized from most recent to oldest

 

Key Journals in the field of labor history

Background for interpretations of Class/consciousness

Recent Directions in the field of labor history

Surveys (see also popular works listing below)

Readers with primary source documents

General Historiography & Interpretive Perspectives

Essay collections

Bibliographies and Archival Information:

Colonial thru Nineteenth Century

Late 19th, early 20th—see community studies as well

Twentieth Century-overviews

Community Studies

Working Class Culture/Cultures of the Workplace (see all community studies)

Managerial Strategies/ Bourgeois Class Formation

Early 20th century

IWW

WWI

1930s/Interwar/CIO interpretations

 Labor in WWII and the 1940s

Labor and the Left/Radicalism/Anticommunism/Cold War and Labor

1950s-present

Capital Disinvestment, Mobility, Globalization

Labor and the State/Labor and the Law (American exceptionalism and the law)

Labor Exceptionalism (this refers to the question of whether U.S. labor was class conscious, and how/why labor-state relations are different from other countries)

Bringing Race Back in/Exceptionalism

African-American Workers

Latino Labor History

Ethnicity/Immigration

Women/Gender

Unemployment/Hours/Leisure

War and Labor/Capital

Biographies of Workers/Radicals in the Movement/Labor Leaders

"Popular" Works/Novels

Videos

Skill in perspective

Professionals

Public Workers

Meatpacking

Prison Labor

Agricultural/Sharecropping/Tenant Farmers/Migrant Farmworkres

Sweatshops

South

West

Illinois

Comparative Labour History - Preliminary Bibliography

 

Working-Class Bibliography from the Website for Working Class Studies   http://www.as.ysu.edu/~cwcs/BIB.html 

including links to working class and geography lists, and lots more

Michael Gordon’s Bibliography on American Labor History since 1865

REFERENCE SOURCES IN U.S. LABOR  STUDIES –from the Bobst Library

                                                                                    http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/tam/resources/

Other  websites—reference source material  -useful information for researching labor history

 

Key Journals

Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas

International Labor and Working Class History

Labor History

Labor's Heritage

Industrial and Labor Relations Review

Labour/LeTravail

--because labor history is now considered an essential part of understanding American history in general, there are lots of key labor history articles are in the mainstream journals, such as Journal of American History, American Hist Review; also International Review of Social History, Journal of American Ethnic History. Thus a JSTOR search is essential to consider any subject.

 

Background for interpretations of Class/consciousness

Zweig, Michael.  The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret.  (2000)

Jack Metzgar Striking Steel: solidarity remembered chapter on class consciousness; working in capitalism article

Leon Fink, excerpt on American Labor History, in New American History

Introduction to Labor Histories by Arnesan, etal

Peter Calvert, The Concept of Class: An Historical Introduction (NY: St. Martin/s Press, 1982)

Aronowitz, Stanley. False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness, (1973, 1993).

Berberoglu, Berch. The Legacy of Empire: Economic Decline and Class Polarization in the United States. New York:

Praeger, 1992.

Zandy, Janet, ed. Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness. (1994.)

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. New York, 1989. This is one of my favorite books

Cheri Register, Packinghouse Daughter –musing about academics and their separation from the working class

Linkon, Sherry Lee and John Russo.  Steeltown U.S.A.: Work and Memory in Youngstown.  2002.

Kazin, “Struggling with Class Struggle: Marxism and the Search for a Synthesis of U.S. Labor History,” Labor History 28 (Fall 1987): 497-514

 Maurice Isserman, “God Bless Our American Institutions: The Labor History of John R. Commons,” Labor History

Ira Katznelson “Working Class formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons, “ in Working Class formation: Nineteenth Century Patterns in Western Europe and the US (Princeton, 1986) p 3-41

Albelda, Randy Pearl and Chris Tilly.  Glass Ceilings and Bottomless Pits: Women's Work, Women's Poverty. 1997.

Sennett, Richard and Jonathan Cobb. The Hidden Injuries of Class.  New York:  1972, 1993.

Rubin, Lillian B.  Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-class Family.  New York