Before the Civil War, the livelihood of most Americans was involved in some way with farming. Yet, because of a lack of readily available information on workers, farm labor has long been neglected by historians. Filing a major gap in the history of American agriculture, labor, and the frontier, David Schob studies this distinctive aspect of American life in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota from 1815 to 1860. Through hundreds of details drawn from farmers' records, diaries and letters, county histories, newspapers, and periodicals, Schob evokes the farm laborer as he broke prairies, harvested grain, drained ditches, dug wells, and worked during off-season winter months logging, sawmilling, and pork packing. Farm work varied with the season and with the ethnic background of the hired hands, each group of immigrants introducing its specialized tasks to the region--the Irish as ditchdiggers and trenchers, the Germans as horticulturists, and the Scandinavians as wood choppers. Together, these groups not only contributed to the economic development of the Midwest, but according to Schob, they also accelerated the westward movement of the American frontier. In addition to providing detailed accounts of the workers' duties and way of life, and information on wages, contracts, and working conditions for routine farm employment, the book sheds light on several previously ignored facets of agricultural and labor history: the work of chore boys and hired girls, whose services were equally important to industrious farmers, and the role of free black farm hands, who augmented the white labor force in the harvest fields and the hazardous work of well digging.

Using an innovative framework, this reader examines the most important and influential writings on modern class relations. Uses an interdisciplinary approach that combines scholarship from political economy, social history, and cultural studies Brings together more than 50 selections rich in theory and empirical detail that span the working, middle, and capitalist classes Analyzes class within the larger context of labor, particularly as it relates to conflicts over and about work Provides insight into the current crisis in the global capitalist system, including the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the explosion of Arab Spring, and the emergence of class conflict in China

Daniel Vickers examines the shifting labor strategies used by colonists as New England evolved from a string of frontier settlements to a mature society on the brink of industrialization. Lacking a means to purchase slaves or hire help, seventeenth-century settlers adapted the labor systems of Europe to cope with the shortages of capital and workers they encountered on the edge of the wilderness. As their world developed, changes in labor arrangements paved the way for the economic transformations of the nineteenth century. By reconstructing the work experiences of thousands of farmers and fishermen in eastern Massachusetts, Vickers identifies who worked for whom and under what terms. Seventeenth-century farmers, for example, maintained patriarchal control over their sons largely to assure themselves of a labor force. The first generation of fish merchants relied on a system of clientage that bound poor fishermen to deliver their hauls in exchange for goods. Toward the end of the colonial period, land scarcity forced farmers and fishermen to search for ways to support themselves through wage employment and home manufacture. Out of these adjustments, says Vickers, emerged a labor market sufficient for industrialization.

In this intriguing and innovative work, James D. Schmidt examines federal efforts to establish "free labor" in the South during and after the Civil War by exploring labor law in the antebellum North and South and its role in the development of a capitalist labor market. Identifying the emergence of conservative, moderate, and liberal stances on state intervention in the labor market, Schmidt develops three important case studies--wartime Reconstruction in Louisiana, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the Freedmen's Bureau--to conclude that the reconstruction of free labor in the South failed in large part because of the underdeveloped and contradictory state of labor law. The same legal principles, Schmidt argues, triumphed in the postwar North to produce a capitalist market in labor.

Labouring Children (1980) is a study of child immigrants, based on numerous original sources, and presents new views on childhood, social work and Canadian rural communities. Between 1868 and 1925 eighty thousand British boys and girls, mostly under fourteen, were apprenticed as agricultural labourers and domestic servants in rural Canada. A surprising feature is the involvement of the Evangelicals, who considered that they were giving children from poor homes a fresh start in the world, yet who were otherwise famed for their emphasis on the virtues of close family ties; and conversely, the parents of the children, largely labourers, who were at the time regarded as too ground down by economic imperatives to find time for affection, but who expended a great deal of effort to maintain contact across imposing distances. This book begins with an analysis of the growing child’s place within these families, and looks at the alternating prominence of demands for wage labour and fear of the ‘dangerous classes’ which influenced emigration policy idealism. The demand for child labour in rural Canada and the work of the children is described in an analysis of the apprenticeship system. The book also illustrates how the British child immigrants were household rather than family members in Canada and outsiders in the rural schoolroom as well. As adults they did not generally become farmers but entered factory jobs, service employment in urban Canada, migrated to the US or returned to Britain. Finally, the book discusses the ending of the movement after World War I, as Canadian social workers, echoing British socialists, argued that even the children of the poor deserved fourteen years of growing and schooling before they were obliged to sell their labour. Incorporating much rich documentation from numerous case records, and presenting a new quantitative use of some of those records, this book sheds light on a dark corner of the Canadian migrant experience.