The New Labor History in American History Textbooks

Abstract

If the new labor history has not changed the face of American historiography in the past twenty years, it certainly ranks among the discipline's most exciting developments. Focusing on the relationship of workers and working-class institutions to the larger social and political culture, labor historians ranging from Herbert G. Gutman and David Montgomery to Christine Stansell and Mary H. Blewett have broadened definitions of the political, challenged traditional views of how economic structure is shaped, and provided much of the empirical data that has encouraged us to rethink the role of race, ethnicity, and gender in constructing national identity.' How much of this scholarship has crept into textbooks? In this essay, we explore how well the new labor history has been incorporated into seven popular texts used in college level introductory United States history courses. We have not included here the one textbook that is built around working people's centrality to United States history, the American Social History Project's Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society (originally conceived and directed by Herbert G. Gutman), but we heartily recommend it to those who wish to place working people's perspectives at the core of their courses.2