Provides a reassessment of the growth and the various directions in US labor history. This title focuses on: the relationship of class and culture; the link between worker's experience and the changing political economy; the role that gender and race have played in America's labor history; and, the transnational turn.

Rethinking U.S. Labor History provides a reassessment of the recent growth and new directions in U.S. labor history. >

"Much the way Walkowitz and Michael Frisch did a quarter century ago with Working-Class America, this superb new volume of essays illustrates the state of the field while setting the agenda for the next generation of U.S. labor history. While attentive to the intersections of class and culture that have animated much recent scholarship, this volume also offers a renewed focus on the structural factors that have impinged on workers' lives. Some of the most interesting essays explore how aspects of working-class culture and consciousness offered resistance to the entreaties of organizers, militants, and strikers, matters historians have too often ignored. Yet others consider the past in light of the new demographics and sectoral dimensions of today's labor force, while emphasizing the power of the state and transnational links to shape working-class lives. Collectively, Walkowitz's and Haverty-Stacke's contributors insist that U.S. labor historians rethink for the politics of a new century the shop-worn definitions of our essential subjects: work and the worker. If "labor" has a future in our neo-liberal era-as a material practice, a form of social organization, and a subject fit for close study-clues to its dynamics will be found in these pages." --Alex Lichtenstein, Florida International University, USA