Melvyn Dubofsky, Hard Work: The Making of Labor History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 249 pp. $17.95 paper; James Green, Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. 352 pp. $50.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.

Abstract

Few fields in American history are as conscious of their historiography as American labor and working-class history. The oft-cited narrative traces the roots of the field to the work of E. P. Thompson and, in particular, to his Making of the English Working Class. Thompson's vision of the working class as the product of common experiences and his boundless belief in the agency of working people helped spur American historians to revisit dusty archives and collect and listen to oral histories in order to give ordinary people a central place in American history. Where the “old labor history” had been located in economics, not history, departments and focused almost exclusively on trade unions as a source of political moderation, the first practitioners of the “new labor history” looked beyond unions for the origins of American radicalism and examples of collective resistance to capitalism. David Montgomery, Herbert Gutman, and David Brody are usually described as the fathers of the “new labor history.” In Hard Work, Melvyn Dubofsky claims his place in that historiographic pantheon.