From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend : A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States

Newly updated: “An enjoyable introduction to American working-class history.” ― The American Prospect Praised for its “impressive even-handedness”, From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people ( Publishers Weekly , starred review). From indentured servants and slaves in seventeenth-century Chesapeake to high-tech workers in contemporary Silicon Valley, the book “[puts] a human face on the people, places, events, and social conditions that have shaped the evolution of organized labor”, enlivened by illustrations from the celebrated comics journalist Joe Sacco ( Library Journal ). Now, the authors have added a wealth of fresh analysis of labor’s role in American life, with new material on sex workers, disability issues, labor’s relation to the global justice movement and the immigrants’ rights movement, the 2005 split in the AFL-CIO and the movement civil wars that followed, and the crucial emergence of worker centers and their relationships to unions. With two entirely new chapters―one on global developments such as offshoring and a second on the 2016 election and unions’ relationships to Trump―this is an “extraordinarily fine addition to U.S. history [that] could become an evergreen . . . comparable to Howard Zinn’s award-winning A People’s History of the United States ” ( Publishers Weekly ). “A marvelously informed, carefully crafted, far-ranging history of working people.” ―Noam Chomsky

From the folks Who Brought You the Weekend is an history of labor in the United States, capturing the full range of working people's struggles, from indentured servants and slaves in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake to high-tech workers in contemporary Silicon Valley.

Publishers Weekly

Management's perpetual dream of cheap labor explains the invention of slavery, though few may couch it in those terms. Drawing such connections with impressive evenhandedness and investigative and analytic acuity, this readable popular history covers U.S. labor from precolonial times to the late 1960s, with two short chapters on the last few decades. Brandishing little-known facts, the authors reshape common views of social history. Remarkably, for instance, hundreds of black indentured servants came to the colonies fromAfricain the 1600s, and throughout the century, as the "peculiar institution" was legalized, these free men and women were forced into slavery. Less astonishing but still significant, the Wobblies pushed as much for free speech as union organizing, and their newspapers were illustrated by famous avant-garde artists. Sometimes the authors simply highlight an obvious fact that has languished in obscurity for instance, that the American Revolution was sparked by the discontent of working people, not the wealthy or landowning, or that many defenders of slavery believed that all labor should be enslaved. Murolo (who teaches American history at Sarah Lawrence College) and Chitty (a librarian at Queens College) gracefully handle a broad range of subject matter Chinese railroad labor is considered alongside housework and steel-mill work making it easier to understand the complex historical relationships between work, gender, ethnicity, race, immigration and sex. (Sept.) Forecast: Accessible to high school students as well as adults, this extraordinarily fine addition to U.S. history and labor literature could become an evergreen paperback comparable to Howard Zinn's award-winningA People's History of the United States. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Foreword and Acknowledgments List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Chapter 1—Labor in Colonial America: The Bound and the Free Legacies of Conquest Indentured Labor in British Colonies Slavery Free Labor Unruly Labor Chapter 2—The American Revolution From Resistance to Independence The People’s War and the Gentlemen’s Republic Republican Legacies Chapter 3—Slavery and Freedom in the New Republic “If You Can’t Fight, Kick” Wage Workers and Activism Solidarity and Fragmentation Westward Expansion and Irrepressible Conflict Chapter 4—Civil War and Reconstruction The Civil War Southern Reconstruction and Counterrevolution Labor Movements and Struggles Whose Government? Chapter 5—Labor Versus Monopoly in the Gilded Age Industrial Capitalism: Consolidation and Crisis The Working Classes The Knights of Labor The American Federation of Labor Populism and Racism Chapter 6—Labor and Empire Empire Abroad, Empire at Home The Labor Movement in the Progressive Era The Great War The War’s Aftermath Chapter 7—America, Inc. The Roaring Twenties The Labor Movement of the Twenties Early Years of the Great Depression Labor Rising Chapter 8—Labor on the March Grassroots Unionism The Rise of the CIO Whose America? Chapter 9—Hot War, Cold War America at War The Postwar World “Big Labor” Chapter 10—The Sixties In the Spirit of Montgomery “Power to the People” The Sixties in the Workplace A House Divided Chapter 11—Hard Times Lean and Mean Race to the Bottom Fighting Back Chapter 12—Brave New World Making Change Steps Forward, Steps Back Turn of the Century Epilogue Suggested Reading Index Hailed in a starred Publishers Weekly review as a work of impressive even-handedness and analytic acuity . . . that gracefully handles a broad range of subject matter, From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend is the first comprehensive look at American history through the prism of working people. From indentured servants and slaves in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake to high-tech workers in contemporary Silicon Valley, the book [puts] a human face on the people, places, events, and social conditions that have shaped the evolution of organized labor (Library Journal). From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend also thoroughly includes the contributions of women, Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants, and minorities, and considers events often ignored in other histories, writes Booklist, which adds that thirty pages of stirring drawings by 'comic journalist' Joe Sacco add an unusual dimension to the book.