Working Class History

Over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, as many as eight million whites left the economically depressed southern countryside and migrated to the booming factory towns and cities of the industrial Midwest in search of work. The "hillbilly highway" was one of the largest internal relocations of poor and working people in American history, yet it has largely escaped close study by historians.

Fifth-generation New Yorker, third-generation bartender, and first-generation author Tara Clancy was raised in three wildly divergent homes: a converted boat shed in working-class Queens; a geriatric commune of feisty, Brooklyn-born Italians; and a sprawling Hamptons estate she visited every other weekend. This childhood triptych comes to life in The Clancys of Queens, an electric, one-of-a-kind memoir.

In May 1970, four days after Kent State, construction workers chased students through downtown Manhattan, beating scores of protesters bloody. As hardhats clashed with hippies, it soon became clear that something larger was underway - Democrats were at war with themselves. In The Hardhat Riot, David Paul Kuhn tells the fateful story of when the white working class first turned against liberalism, when Richard Nixon seized the breach, and America was forever changed.

Over the last decade, Britain has been rocked by a series of political revolts. In trying to make sense of this remarkable churn and change, many commentators cling to very short-term and unconvincing explanations, pointing to social media, dark money, individual leaders, or the promises made to voters. But, as acclaimed political scientist Matthew Goodwin reveals in this strikingly original study, this turbulence has been a long time in the making—and it is set to continue for many years to come.

Carlos Bulosan’s idealism and ambition would seem to position him for certain success in America, even given how young he is when he first makes the journey from the Philippines. However, after arriving in Seattle, employers are far more concerned with his Filipino background than they are with his character. Low-paying jobs - and an uncertain future - remain his daily reality.

Love and the Working Class is a unique look at the emotions of hard-living, nineteenth-century Americans who were often on the cusp of literacy. These laboring folk highly valued letters and, however difficult it was, wrote to stay connected to those they loved. This book displays the personal expression of factory hands, manual laborers, peddlers, coopers, carpenters, lumbermen, miners, tanners, haulers, tailors, seamstresses, laundresses, domestics, sharecroppers, independent farmers, and common soldiers and their wives.

Drawing from careful examinations of their personal narratives, Jamie L. Bronstein investigates the ways in which working people thought about the good life as seen through their experiences with family and friends, rewarding work, interaction with the natural world, science and creativity, political causes and religious commitments, and physical and economic struggles. Informed by the history of emotions and the philosophical and social-scientific literature on happiness, this book reflects broadly on the industrial-era working-class experience in an era of immense social and economic change.