'Downing Street is said to be 'furious' at this book - and it is easy to understand why. It is the first meticulous chronicle of all that has happened since that bright May Day three years ago which first brought the Blair government to office' Anthony Howard, Sunday Times

Celebrating the centenary of the Parliamentary Labour Party, this fascinating book commemorates the twenty-nine founding Labour MPs elected in 1906, including Labour’s first Prime Minister, first Chancellor of the Exchequer, first Minister of Labour, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. With a foreword by Tony Blair, Men Who Made Labour focuses on the pioneers’ origins, expectations, world vision and achievements in the context of early twentieth-century conditions, when the prospect of any Labour government was still a distant dream. Drawing upon a vast array of previously unpublished material, and with obituaries primarily written by the twenty-first century successors to those original MPs, the text provides a unique insight into how today’s politicians view their party’s past – ensuring that it is an excellent resource for all politics and modern history students, as well as general readers with an interest in the area.

A brilliant and surprising investigation into why we date the way we do

Business leaders, conservative ideologues, and even some radicals of the early twentieth century dismissed working people's intellect as stunted, twisted, or altogether missing. They compared workers toiling in America's sprawling factories to animals, children, and robots. Working people regularly defied these expectations, cultivating the knowledge of experience and embracing a vibrant subculture of self-education and reading. Labor's Mind uses diaries and personal correspondence, labor college records, and a range of print and visual media to recover this social history of the working-class mind. As Higbie shows, networks of working-class learners and their middle-class allies formed nothing less than a shadow labor movement. Dispersed across the industrial landscape, this movement helped bridge conflicts within radical and progressive politics even as it trained workers for the transformative new unionism of the 1930s. Revelatory and sympathetic, Labor's Mind reclaims a forgotten chapter in working-class intellectual life while mapping present-day possibilities for labor, higher education, and digitally enabled self-study.

A richly textured ethnography about knitwear manufacturers in South India that explains how peasant-workers have refined notions of place, gender, and class to create a local industrial form that succeeds in the global economy.