Ten leading scholars of early American social history here examine the nature of work and labor in America from 1614 to 1820. The authors scrutinize work diaries, private and public records, and travelers' accounts. Subjects include farmers, farmwives, urban laborers, plantation slave workers, midwives, and sailors; locales range from Maine to the Caribbean and the high seas. These essays recover the regimen that consumed the waking hours of most adults in the New World, defined their economic lives, and shaped their larger existence. Focusing on individuals as well as groups, the authors emphasize the choices that, over time, might lead to prosperity or to the poorhouse. Few people enjoyed sinecures, and every day brought new risks. Stephen Innes introduces the collection by elucidating the prophetic vision of Captain John Smith: that the New World offered abundant reward for one's "owne industrie." Several motifs stand out in the essays. Family labor has begun to assume greater prominence, both as a collective work unit and as a collective economic unit whose members worked independently. Of growing interest to contemporary scholars is the role of family size and sex ratio in determining economic decision, and vice ersa. Work patterns appear to have been driven by the goal of creating surplus production for markets; perhaps because of a desire for higher consumption, work patterns began to intensify throughout the eighteenth century and led to longer work days with fewer slack periods. Overall, labor relations showed no consistent evolution but remained fluid and flexible in the face of changing market demands in highly diverse environments. The authors address as well the larger questions of American development and indicate the directions that research in this expanding field might follow.

Unfair Labor? is the first book to explore the economic impact of Native Americans who participated in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago. By the late nineteenth century, tribal economic systems across the Americas were decimated, and tribal members were desperate to find ways to support their families and control their own labor. As U.S. federal policies stymied economic development in tribal communities, individual Indians found creative new ways to make a living by participating in the cash economy. Before and during the exposition, American Indians played an astonishingly broad role in both the creation and the collection of materials for the fair, and in a variety of jobs on and off the fairgrounds. While anthropologists portrayed Indians as a remembrance of the past, the hundreds of Native Americans who participated were carving out new economic pathways. Once the fair opened, Indians from tribes across the United States, as well as other indigenous people, flocked to Chicago. Although they were brought in to serve as displays to fairgoers, they had other motives as well. Once in Chicago they worked to exploit circumstances to their best advantage. Some succeeded; others did not. Unfair Labor? breaks new ground by telling the stories of individual laborers at the fair, uncovering the roles that Indians played in the changing economic conditions of tribal peoples, and redefining their place in the American socioeconomic landscape.

Why did American workers, unlike their European counterparts, fail to forge a class-based movement to pursue broad social reform? Was it simply that they lacked class consciousness and were more interested in personal mobility? In a richly detailed survey of labor law and labor history, William Forbath challenges this notion of American “individualism.” In fact, he argues, the nineteenth-century American labor movement was much like Europe’s labor movements in its social and political outlook, but in the decades around the turn of the century, the prevailing attitude of American trade unionists changed. Forbath shows that, over time, struggles with the courts and the legal order were crucial to reshaping labor’s outlook, driving the labor movement to temper its radical goals.

The first major volume to place U.S.-centered labor history in a transnational focus, Workers Across the Americas collects the newest scholarship of Canadianist, Caribbeanist, and Latin American specialists as well as U.S. historians. These essays highlight both the supra- and sub-national aspect of selected topics without neglecting nation-states themselves as historical forces. Indeed, the transnational focus opens new avenues for understanding changes in the concepts, policies, and practice of states, their interactions with each other and their populations, and the ways in which the popular classes resist, react, and advance their interests.What does this transnational turn encompass? And what are its likely perils as well as promise as a framework for research and analysis? To address these questions John French, Julie Greene, Neville Kirk, Aviva Chomsky, Dirk Hoerder, and Vic Satzewich lead off the volume with critical commentaries on the project of transnational labor history. Their responses offer a tour of explanations, tensions, and cautions in the evolution of a new arena of research and writing. Thereafter, Workers Across the Americas groups fifteen research essays around themes of labor and empire, indigenous peoples and labor systems, international feminism and reproductive labor, labor recruitment and immigration control, transnational labor politics, and labor internationalism. Topics range from military labor in the British Empire to coffee workers on the Guatemalan/Mexican border to the role of the International Labor Organization in attempting to set common labor standards. Leading scholars introduce each section and recommend further reading.

This book, designed to give a survey history of American labor from colonial times to the present, is uniquely well suited to speak to the concerns of today’s teachers and students. As issues of growing inequality, stagnating incomes, declining unionization, and exacerbated job insecurity have increasingly come to define working life over the last 20 years, a new generation of students and teachers is beginning to seek to understand labor and its place and ponder seriously its future in American life. Like its predecessors, this ninth edition of our classic survey of American labor is designed to introduce readers to the subject in an engaging, accessible way.

"An eloquent and essential correction to contemporary discussions of the American working class."—The Nation From the ongoing issues of poverty, health, housing, and employment to the recent upsurge of lethal police-community relations, the black working class stands at the center of perceptions of social and racial conflict today. Journalists and public policy analysts often discuss the black poor as “consumers” rather than “producers,” as “takers” rather than “givers,” and as “liabilities” instead of “assets.” In his engrossing history, Workers on Arrival, Joe William Trotter, Jr., refutes these perceptions by charting the black working class’s vast contributions to the making of America. Covering the last four hundred years since Africans were first brought to Virginia in 1619, Trotter traces the complicated journey of black workers from the transatlantic slave trade to the demise of the industrial order in the twenty-first century. At the center of this compelling, fast-paced narrative are the actual experiences of these African American men and women. A dynamic and vital history of remarkable contributions despite repeated setbacks, Workers on Arrival expands our understanding of America’s economic and industrial growth, its cities, ideas, and institutions, and the real challenges confronting black urban communities today.

Millions of laborers, from the Philippines to the Caribbean, performed the work of the United States empire. Forging a global economy connecting the tropics to the industrial center, workers harvested sugar, cleaned hotel rooms, provided sexual favors, and filled military ranks. Placing working men and women at the center of the long history of the U.S. empire, these essays offer new stories of empire that intersect with the “grand narratives” of diplomatic affairs at the national and international levels. Missile defense, Cold War showdowns, development politics, military combat, tourism, and banana economics share something in common—they all have labor histories. This collection challenges historians to consider the labor that formed, worked, confronted, and rendered the U.S. empire visible. The U.S. empire is a project of global labor mobilization, coercive management, military presence, and forced cultural encounter. Together, the essays in this volume recognize the United States as a global imperial player whose systems of labor mobilization and migration stretched from Central America to West Africa to the United States itself. Workers are also the key actors in this volume. Their stories are multi-vocal, as workers sometimes defied the U.S. empire’s rhetoric of civilization, peace, and stability and at other times navigated its networks or benefited from its profits. Their experiences reveal the gulf between the American ‘denial of empire’ and the lived practice of management, resource exploitation, and military exigency. When historians place labor and working people at the center, empire appears as a central dynamic of U.S. history.