American Labor History

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This graduate seminar explores the history of American work, workers, labor movements, and labor policies from the nation's founding to the near present. It argues for the centrality of The Labor Question to the human experience: Who does the work? What are the terms? Who gets the fruits? Who makes the rules? The course adopts a chronological approach, probing continuities and changes in work at the levels of law, culture, and lived experience over two-plus centuries of US history. It also casts an expansive net in terms of workplaces: the focus will be on those who worked for others, whether that work was paid or unpaid; coerced, contracted, or consented to; or even considered work by contemporaries. Designed to introduce students to important questions and debates via classic and cutting-edge scholarship, the course aims to integrate labor history and historiography within the broader study of the American past, intersecting fields such as the history of capitalism, gender history, economic and social history, political history, religious history, and the histories of race and ethnicity.