Labor and Urban Studies

Labor History

Defending Rights: Law, Labor Politics, and the State in California, 1890–1925

Thomas R. Clark

By focusing on the impact of the judiciary at the state level, Defending Rights brings a new perspective to revisionist work on the union movement’s political activism during the Progressive Era.

“My World Is Gone”: Memories of Life in a Southern Cotton Mill Town

George G. Suggs, Jr.

The world of textile workers in Bladenboro, North Carolina, during two decades of depression and war.

Knights Unhorsed: Internal Conflict in a Gilded Age Social Movement

Robert E. Weir

An examination of the leadership of the largest labor organization of the nineteenth century, the Knights of Labor.

Radical Education in the Rural South: Commonwealth College, 1923–1940

William H. Cobb

Cobb illuminates the history of the longest-lived and most notorious of the resident labor colleges that operated during the 1920s and 1930s.

The Bonds of Labor: German Journeys to the Working World, 1890–1990

Carol Poore

An examination of the German intellectual’s experience of manual labor.

The Reuther Brothers: Walter, Roy, and Victor

Mike Smith and Pam Smith

The story of three brothers who helped to found one of America’s great unions.