2002 review
Surveying the survey texts: Recent works in American labor history
[Review of ]. LABOR HISTORY, 43(3), 335–342.
UN Sustainable Development Goal Categories
8. Decent Work and Economic Growth
(OpenAlex)
Source: Web Of Science
Added: August 6, 2018
Perhaps it was the coming of the millennium—a desire to take stock of where we have been and where we may be going. For whatever reason, there has been a recent outpouring of new American labor history textbooks. Several are revisions of older works, others promise new analytical arguments and models for interpreting the eld. Not surprisingly, each has its own strengths and weaknesses, but they all reveal that American labor history is a eld still struggling for self-de nition. Even the simple, and perhaps tautological, statement that labor history is the history of labor raises a host of questions that go to the heart of what may delineate this eld of inquiry. How should labor be de ned? Is labor the same as work; is work equal to manual labor, or wage work? This de nition runs the risk of con ning labor history to the study of workers as economic actors de ned solely by their relationship to the means of production. Such a proposition ignores the historical experience of millions of