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The Bahá’í House of Worship, a tall, ornate building made of concrete, illuminated against a cloudy sky.

The Beauty of Concrete

Why are buildings today simple and austere, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor.
by Samuel Hughes via Works In Progress on May 17, 2024
A young girl tends the spinning machine at a cotton mill in North Carolina.
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The Forgotten History of the Child Labor Amendment

State-level rollbacks to child labor protections show the need for a constitutional amendment introduced 100 years ago.
by Betsy Wood via Made By History on May 13, 2024
Black nurses and Sea View Hospital.

The ‘Black Angels’ Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis

Professional nurses who moved north during the Great Migration worked in New York City’s most contagious sanatorium — and changed the course of public health.
by Maria Smilios via The Emancipator on May 9, 2024
Ella Watson in American Gothic, photographed by Gordon Parks.

She Was No ‘Mammy’

Gordon Parks’s most famous photograph, "American Gothic," was of a cleaning woman in Washington, D.C. She has a story to tell.
by Salamishah Tillet via The Atlantic on May 8, 2024
Haymarket riot, as depicted in Harpers Magazine.

May Day is a Rust Belt Holiday

Forged in the cauldron of Chicago’s streets and factories, born from the experience of workers in the mills and plants of Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland.
by Ed Simon via Belt Magazine on April 29, 2024
George Eliot

“As If You Was a Insect”

George Eliot refused to stereotype the rural working class. Her outlook would serve us well today.
by Matthew Karp via Harper’s on April 26, 2024
A field of cotton.

What a Series of Killings in Rural Georgia Revealed About Early 20th-Century America

On the continuing regime of racial terror in the post-Civil War American South.
by Earl Swift via Literary Hub on April 25, 2024
At nighttime, the levels inside the Milton S. Eisenhower Library light up the windows, showing stacks of books and the silhouettes of students working at tables and lounging at chairs, from A Level to B Level and M Level at the top, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 1965.

The Education Factory

By looking at the labor history of academia, you can see the roots of a crisis in higher education that has been decades in the making.
by Erik Baker via The Nation on April 22, 2024
Boiling House at the Sugar Plantation Asunción, Cuba, 1857.

Slavery Was Crucial for the Development of Capitalism

Historian Robin Blackburn has completed a trilogy of books that provide a comprehensive Marxist account of slavery in the New World.
by Robin Blackburn, Owen Dowling via Jacobin on April 10, 2024
"Soulsville" mural in Memphis, Tennessee.

Capitalism and (Under)Development in the American South

In the American South, an oligarchy of planters enriched itself through slavery. Pervasive underdevelopment is their legacy.
by Keri Leigh Merritt via Aeon on April 2, 2024
The Hollywood sign replaced with the words "The End."

The Life and Death of Hollywood

Film and television writers face an existential threat.
by Daniel Bessner via Harper’s on March 21, 2024
Branko Milanovic, 2017.

The Problematic Past, Present, and Future of Inequality Studies

An intellectual history of inequality in economic theory reveals the ideological reasons behind the field’s resurgence in the last few decades.
by Branko Milanović, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins via The Nation on March 20, 2024
Etching of friends playing a game of chess, dated to the nineteenth century.

Get Capitalists’ Grubby Hands Off Our Hobbies

Christian moralists long promoted hobbies as a way to occupy idle hands, bringing the work ethic into free time. Today hobbies risk turning into side hustles.
by Helmer Stoel via Jacobin on March 19, 2024
A collage of suggestive images of women, a woman holding a camera, and a red letter X.

How Candida Royalle Set Out to Reinvent Porn

As a feminist in the adult-film industry, she believed the answer wasn’t banning porn; it was better porn.
by Margaret Talbot via The New Yorker on March 18, 2024
Woodrow Wilson working at his desk on May 1, 1917.

Don’t Be So Quick to Laud Woodrow Wilson

An effort is underway to restore President Wilson’s reputation as a great reformer. His best reforms were won by a mass movement, often pushing against Wilson.
by Henry Snow via Jacobin on March 14, 2024
The cover of "Beyond Norma Rae" by Aimee Loiselle

Who Makes the American Working Class: Women Workers and Culture

Female industrial workers across the country and from diverse racial backgrounds fought to tell their own stories.
by Brock Schnoke via UNC Press Blog on March 13, 2024
Irma Sherman, Chair of McMaid Workers Organizing Committee.

How Four Black Women Changed Labor Organizing Forever

40 years ago in Chicago, McMaid workers sparked a movement.
by Keith Kelleher via The Forge on February 13, 2024
An engraving of Mrs. David Meade Randolph by Charle de Saint-Mémin.

Southern Hospitality? The Abstracted Labor of the Whole Pig Roast

Barbecue is a cornerstone of American cuisine, containing all of the contradictions of the country itself.
by Jessica Carbone via Perspectives on History on January 19, 2024
Dred Scott.

Setting the Records Straight: U.S. Officers’ Pay Claims “Vouching” for Slavery

Military archives reveal the brutal history of slavery in the U.S. Army.
by Yoav Hamdani via The Panorama on January 2, 2024
Collage depicting shipping containers, a scale weighing American dollars, and a screen of numbers and percentages

Free Trade's Origin Myth

American elites accepted the economic theory of "comparative advantage" mainly because it justified their geopolitical agenda.
by Oren Cass via Law & Liberty on January 2, 2024
Liberian workers at the Firestone Plantation carrying buckets of latex in buckets on their shoulders.

The Human Price of American Rubber

Segregated lives of pride and peril on Firestone's Liberian plantations.
by Gregg Mitman via The Disappearing Spoon on December 7, 2023
A portrait of Andrew Jackson.

Whiggism Is Still Wrong

Vivek Ramaswamy says he wants to "make hard work cool again." He isn’t the first.
by Sohrab Ahmari via The American Conservative on November 21, 2023
Donald Trump, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, and Vince McMhaon at a press conference before Wrestlemania 23, 2007.

The Misunderstood History of American Wrestling

A recent biography of Vince McMahon presents him as an entertainment tycoon who changed culture and politics. The real story is as banal as it is brutal.
by Nadine Smith via The Nation on November 10, 2023
Display selling nuts

“Girls, We Can’t Lose!”: In 1930s St Louis, Black Women Workers Went on Strike and Won

During the Great Depression, St. Louis's Funsten Nut Factory was racially divided. But Black workers went on strike — and got their white coworkers to join them.
by Devin Thomas O’Shea via Jacobin on November 8, 2023
Employees working at desks in post office

Guaranteed Income? 14th Grade? Before AI, Tech Fears Drove Bold Ideas.

Three-quarters of a century before artificial intelligence concerns, rapid advances in automation prompted panic about mass unemployment—and radical solutions.
by Jerry Prout via Retropolis on October 29, 2023
Labor day parade

Just Transition: Learning From the Tactics of Past Labor Movements

It is time to recognize the power that organized labor can wield to fight for environmental, economic and social justice.
by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Dylan Plummer via The Trouble on October 12, 2023
Loggers standing next to logs floating down a river in the Oregon forests
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Water Logs

Log drivers once steered loose timber on rivers across America before railroad expansion put such shepherds out of work.
by Akanksha Singh via JSTOR Daily on October 3, 2023
A drawing of a woman looking inside the door of a church where children are playing.

The Quiet Revolution of the Sabbath

Requiring rest, rather than work, is still a radical idea.
by Casey N. Cep via The New Yorker on September 30, 2023

Eight and Skate

The age of optimism that lasted in the US from the 1940s to the 1970s looked, basically, like a car.
by Gabriel Winant via New York Review of Books on September 23, 2023
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain shaking hands with union members.

Can the UAW Transform America Again?

By thinking big, Shawn Fain is summoning memories of Walter Reuther and the autoworkers’ union’s finest hour.
by Timothy Noah via The New Republic on September 15, 2023
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