Historians and the Study of Labor and Working-Class History

 A. Institutional/liberal--John R. Commons and the "Wisconsin School"

Selig Perlman, A Theory of the Labor Movement (1924).

Maurice Isserman, "`God Bless Our American Institutions': The Labor History of John R. Commons," Labor History, 17(Summer, 1976), 309-328.

Andy Dawson, "History and Ideology: Fifty Years of `Job Consciousness'," Literature and History, 4(Autumn, 1978), 223-241.

B. Marxist/ Neo-Marxist

1. "Classical" Marxist approaches

Philip Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States (Multi-volume work).

Melvyn Dubofsky, "Give Us That Old Time Labor History: Philip S. Foner and the American Worker," Labor History, 26 (1985), 118-35.

Sally M. Miller, "Philip Foner and 'Integrating' Women into Labor History and African-American History," in Labor History 33 (Fall 1992), 456-469.

2. Neo-Marxist/labor segmentation theory/social relations of production school

Michael Reich, "Capitalist Development, Class Relations, and Labor History," pp. 30-54 in Carroll Moody and Alice Kessler Harris, Perspectives on American Labor History: The Problems of Synthesis (Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989).

David Montgomery's Workers' Control in America (Cambridge, 1979).

Stephen Meyer III, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921.

Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital : The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.

3. Romantic Culturalism"--culture as power

Herbert G. Gutman, "Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919," pp. 3-78 in Gutman's Work, Culture & Society in Industrializing America (New York, 1977). [75 pp]

Herbert G. Gutman, Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class (New Press, 1992) [Selection announced in class]

C. Recent Directions in Scholarship: "Post-modernism," "Gendered" Labor History, and the quest for synthesis

Ava Baron, "Gender and Labor History: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future," pp. 1-46 in Ava Baron, ed. Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca, 1991).

Mari Jo Buhle, "Gender and Labor History," pp. 55-79 in Carroll Moody and Alice Kessler Harris, Perspectives on American Labor History: The Problems of Synthesis (Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989).

Elizabeth Faue, "Gender and the Reconstruction of Labor History: An Introduction." Labor History, 34 (Spring-Summer 1993), 169-177.

Leon Fink, "Culture's Last Stand? Gender and the Search for Synthesis in American Labor History." Labor History, 34 (Spring-Summer 1993), 178-189.

Alice Kessler-Harris, "Treating the Male as "Other": Redefining the Parameters of Labor History." Labor History, 34 (Spring-Summer 1993), 190-204.

Joan Scott, "On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History," in International Labor and Working Class History 31 (Spring 1987), 1-13. This is also reprinted in Scott's Gender and the Politics of History.

Response of Bryan D. Palmer to Joan Scott's "On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History," in International Labor and Working Class History 31 (Spring 1987), 14-23.

Selection from Bryan Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, 1990).

Lenard R. Berlanstein, Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse & Class Analysis (U. of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 1-54.


 
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