labor history

Introducing a project on US labor history, exploring what we can learn from 1930s-1950s industrial struggles.

The esteemed labor historian reflects on his life and career, including Berkeley in the 1960s, Walter Reuther, the early UAW, Walmart, Bill Clinton, and more.

Women’s economic labor was essential to state function.

We thought we knew the white working class. Then 2016 happened.

Recovering the long-overlooked significance of the “hillbilly highway” in the US, with implications for labor history as well as US history broadly.

A 1941 novel by a former Communist Party member about the dog-eat-dog scumbaggery of movie executives and the lying and artless bragging that Hollywood runs on.

What it means to be a Black worker in the time since slavery.

Exploring recent debates about the uses–and utility–of Black history in both the academic and public spheres.

Staten Island gets a lot of disrespect from other New Yorkers, some of it fair. But it has its own fascinating people’s history.

The frightening character who appears amid US union disputes can be traced back to a single factory, which wasn’t unionized.

Today’s activists should look to North Carolina's black and white tobacco workers, who organized a union and went on strike in the teeth of the Jim Crow South.

Unearthing the Black history in America’s national parks.

'Isn’t this supposed to be the museum of the motion picture industry?' a historian asks. 'They forgot about the industry part.'

What gets lost when we view the American past as primarily a story about capitalism? 

At a recent commemoration of the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia, songs of struggle took center stage.

Two new books on the history of feminism emphasize global grassroots efforts and the influence of American women labor leaders on international agreements.

A six-hour workday could have become the national standard during the Great Depression. Here's the story of why that didn't happen.

The daring women whose transatlantic journeys challenged gender roles.

Long before Trump, politicians on the country’s West Coast mobilized a white working-class base through violent hate of Chinese and Japanese immigrants.

A new history charts the forgotten ways the social politics of the Roosevelt years transformed the United States.