From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

An Illustrated History of Labor in the United States

Priscilla Murolo, A.B. Chitty, Joe Sacco

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781620974483
• eBook ISBN:
  9781620974490
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

Newly updated: “An enjoyable introduction to American working-class history.” —The American Prospect
 
Praised for its “impressive even-handedness”, From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people (Publishers Weekly, starred review). From indentured servants and slaves in seventeenth-century Chesapeake to high-tech workers in contemporary Silicon Valley, the book “[puts] a human face on the people, places, events, and social conditions that have shaped the evolution of organized labor”, enlivened by illustrations from the celebrated comics journalist Joe Sacco (Library Journal).
 
Now, the authors have added a wealth of fresh analysis of labor’s role in American life, with new material on sex workers, disability issues, labor’s relation to the global justice movement and the immigrants’ rights movement, the 2005 split in the AFL-CIO and the movement civil wars that followed, and the crucial emergence of worker centers and their relationships to unions. With two entirely new chapters—one on global developments such as offshoring and a second on the 2016 election and unions’ relationships to Trump—this is an “extraordinarily fine addition to U.S. history [that] could become an evergreen . . . comparable to Howard Zinn’s award-winning A People’s History of the United States” (Publishers Weekly).
 
“A marvelously informed, carefully crafted, far-ranging history of working people.” —Noam Chomsky

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface to the Revised Edition
• Foreword and Acknowledgments from the First Edition
• 1. Labor in Colonial America: The Bound and the Free
• 2. The American Revolution
• 3. Slavery and Freedom in the New Republic
• 4. Civil War and Reconstruction
• 5. Labor Versus Monopoly in the Gilded Age
• 6. Labor and Empire
• 7. America, Inc.
• 8. Labor on the March
• 9. Hot War, Cold War
• 10. The Sixties
• 11. Hard Times
• 12. One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
• 13. Workers of the World
• 14. Rising Tide
• 15. Tipping Points
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes and Selected Bibliographies
• Index
• About the Authors