Labor History

Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price, and Profit by Karl Marx is a compelling introduction to Marxist economic theory, combining two of his most influential works. In Wage-Labour and Capital, Marx explores the relationship between labor and capital, illuminating how the commodification of labor under capitalism generates profit for capitalists at the expense of workers. In Value, Price, and Profit, Marx delves deeper into the mechanisms of capitalist economies, discussing the labor theory of value, the creation of surplus value, and the inherent exploitation of wage labor.

Set during one of America’s most tumultuous periods, A Summer of Fever and Freedom is a historical fiction novel about coming out, coming of age, and coming together, and an ode to the revolutions we all experience. At eighteen years old, Jane is teetering on the cusp of womanhood, a rite of passage complicated and painful for even the most stable of hearts. For Jane, who is anxiously awaiting her brother’s return from the war in Vietnam, the heavy journey is cracking her already fragile foundation. When she attends a party in Greenwich Village and meets twenty-three-year-old gay ...

In 1869, when the final spike was driven into the Transcontinental Railroad, few were prepared for its seismic aftershocks. Once a hodgepodge of short, squabbling lines, America's railways soon exploded into a titanic industry helmed by a pageant of speculators, crooks, and visionaries. The vicious competition between empire builders such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, and E. H. Harriman sparked stock market frenzies, panics, and crashes; provoked strikes; transformed the nation's geography; and culminated in a ferocious two-man battle....

In 1934, hundreds of jobless World War I veterans were sent to the remote Florida Keys to build a highway from Miami to Key West. The Roosevelt Administration was making a genuine effort to help these down-and-out vets. But the attempt to help them turned into a tragedy. The supervisors in charge of the veterans misunderstood the danger posed by hurricanes in the low-lying Florida Keys. The hurricane that struck the Upper Florida Keys on the evening of September 2, 1935, is still the most powerful hurricane to make landfall in the US.

You may have learned about Cesar Chavez’s leadership in organizing the well-known Delano Grape Strike and Boycott of the 1960s. But did you know it began as a strike led by Larry Itliong? He was a Filipino labor organizer who had also been working with grape pickers in California at the time.

Sofi Thanhauser brilliantly tells five stories—Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics, Wool—about the clothes we wear and where they come from, illuminating our world in unexpected ways. She takes us from the opulent court of Louis XIV to the labor camps in modern-day Chinese-occupied Xinjiang. We see how textiles were once dyed with lichen, shells, bark, saffron, and beetles, displaying distinctive regional weaves and knits, and how the modern Western garment industry has refashioned our attire into the homogenous and disposable uniforms popularized by fast-fashion brands.

Silicon Valley has sold us the illusion that artificial intelligence is a frictionless technology that will bring wealth and prosperity to humanity. But hidden beneath this smooth surface lies the grim reality of a precarious global workforce of millions laboring under often appalling conditions to make A.I. possible. This book presents an urgent, riveting investigation of the intricate network that maintains this exploitative system, revealing the untold truth of A.I.

The dramatic story of the explosive 1894 clash of industry, labor, and government that shook the nation and marked a turning point for America. The Edge of Anarchy offers a vivid account of the greatest uprising of working people in American history. At the pinnacle of the Gilded Age, a boycott of Pullman sleeping cars by hundreds of thousands of railroad employees brought commerce to a standstill across much of the country. Famine threatened, riots broke out along the rail lines. Soon the US Army was on the march and gunfire rang from the streets of major cities.

The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 was a monumental achievement. Linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean, it transformed New York City into a hub of international trade, drove the rise of industrial cities in once sparsely populated areas, and accelerated the westward expansion of the United States. Yet few of the laborers who toiled along the canal shared in the prosperity it brought.

A collection of newspaper articles about Dust Bowl migrants in California’s Central Valley by the author of The Grapes of Wrath.

“Half a league, half a league/ Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death/ Rode the six hundred.” Lieutenant Richard Greyston seeks heroic glory in the Charge of the Light Brigade. Jennifer Neville goes to Scutari as one of Florence Nightingale’s nurses dreaming of wiping the brows of the wounded. Richard winds up blinded and Jennifer spends her days carrying slops as mice fall from the walls of the hospital. Back in London Jennifer throws herself into charity work under the leadership of the Earl of Shaftesbury. She is delighted to reconnect with the convalescing Richard until ...

Alec MacGillis’ Fulfillment is not another inside account or exposé of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that company’s growing shadow. As MacGillis shows, Amazon’s sprawling network of delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated.

Between 1848 and 1899, more gold was removed from the earth than had been mined in the 3,000 preceding years, bringing untold wealth to individuals and nations. But friction between Chinese and white settlers on the goldfields of California, Australia, and South Africa catalyzed a global battle over "the Chinese Question": Would the United States and the British Empire outlaw Chinese immigration?

This new South End Press edition makes available the full text of this out-of-print classic - along with a new foreword by Manning Marable, interviews with participants in DRUM, and reflections on political developments over the past three decades by Georgakas and Surkin.

London Labour and the London Poor is a rare and fascinating insight into the lives and struggles of the 19th-century poor. Written by journalist and reformer Henry Mayhew, a founder and editor of the satirical magazine Punch, it collects hundreds of testimonials from the lower strata of Victorian society. We encounter street entertainers, 'pure finders', cabinetmakers, gingerbread sellers, 'screeve-fakers', swindlers, and burglars. We hear accounts from toshers finding items in sewers, people attempting to train pigs to dance, and witness the sale of everything from gilt watches and chickweed to needles, dog collars, and eel soup.

One of America's greatest investigative reporters brings to life the gripping, no-holds-barred clash of two American titans: Robert Kennedy and his nemesis, Jimmy Hoffa. From 1957 to 1964, Robert Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa channeled nearly all of their considerable powers into destroying each other. Kennedy's battle with Hoffa burst into the public consciousness with the 1957 Senate Rackets Committee hearings and intensified when his brother named him attorney general in 1961.

Jack Woodford was, very early in his life, during his college years and throughout law school, the confidant, piano player, and speech and diction instructor for Al Capone. Like our Wild West of 1840-1890, the Chicago gangster era of 1920-29 occupies a special place in the hearts and minds of anyone who has ever given the United States of America any thought at all. It was a time of derring-do committed by very young men who competed violently for very high financial stakes, corrupting virtually all of the agents of local law and order in the process. Next to Chicago of the 1920’s, Dodge ...

When the local iron mine began hiring women in 1975, Lois Jenson, a single mother on welfare, didn't think twice about accepting the grueling but well-paid job. What she hadn't considered was that she was entering a male-dominated society that fiercely resisted the inclusion of women, a prejudice born out in the brutal harassment of every female miner.

Thinking against the grain, Graeber was one of the few who dared to imagine a new understanding of the past and a liberatory vision of the future--to imagine a social order based on humans' fundamental freedom. In essays published over three decades and ranging across the biggest issues of our time-- inequality, technology, the identity of "the West," democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid, and protest--he challenges the old assumptions about political life.

The IWW’s members have been known for more than a century as the Wobblies, and no one knows how they got the name, although there are stories that an immigrant had trouble pronouncing the letters. The Wobblies quickly became a considerable force in American labor, and by far the most colorful union of its era, if not always particularly effective. This work tells the story of how they came about, the peak of their influence, and the lasting legacy they forged.