From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States - Softcover

Murolo, Priscilla

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565847768 ISBN 13: 9781565847767

Publisher: The New Press, 2003

Synopsis

An updated edition of “an evergreen . . . comparable to Howard Zinn’s award–winning A People’s History of the United States” (Publishers Weekly)

Hailed as a work of “impressive even-handedness and analytic acuity” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people. 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” (Library Journal), enlivened by numerous full-page illustrations throughout from the celebrated comics journalist Joe Sacco.

In this fully updated new edition, authors Priscilla Murolo and A.B. Chitty 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, from the movement of jobs offshore to the emergence of modern global union federations, and a second on the 2016 election and unions’ relationships to Trump—From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend will remain the standard, “comprehensive history of American labor” (The Washington Post).

About this title

About the Author:

Priscilla Murolo teaches American history at Sarah Lawrence College. The co-author, with A.B. Chitty, of From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: An Illustrated History of Labor in the United States (The New Press), she lives in Yonkers, New York. Comics journalist Joe Sacco is the author of Palestine, Safe Area Goražde, and The Great War and the illustrator for From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: An Illustrated History of Labor in the United States (The New Press). He lives in Portland, Oregon. A.B. Chitty works as a librarian systems officer at Queens College. The co-author, with Priscilla Murolo, of From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: An Illustrated History of Labor in the United States (The New Press), he lives in Yonkers, New York.

From Publishers Weekly:

Management's perpetual dream of cheap labor explains the invention of slavery, though few may couch it in those terms. Drawing such connections with impressive evenhandedness and investigative and analytic acuity, this readable popular history covers U.S. labor from precolonial times to the late 1960s, with two short chapters on the last few decades. Brandishing little-known facts, the authors reshape common views of social history. Remarkably, for instance, hundreds of black indentured servants came to the colonies fromAfricain the 1600s, and throughout the century, as the "peculiar institution" was legalized, these free men and women were forced into slavery. Less astonishing but still significant, the Wobblies pushed as much for free speech as union organizing, and their newspapers were illustrated by famous avant-garde artists. Sometimes the authors simply highlight an obvious fact that has languished in obscurity for instance, that the American Revolution was sparked by the discontent of working people, not the wealthy or landowning, or that many defenders of slavery believed that all labor should be enslaved. Murolo (who teaches American history at Sarah Lawrence College) and Chitty (a librarian at Queens College) gracefully handle a broad range of subject matter Chinese railroad labor is considered alongside housework and steel-mill work making it easier to understand the complex historical relationships between work, gender, ethnicity, race, immigration and sex. (Sept.)Forecast: Accessible to high school students as well as adults, this extraordinarily fine addition to U.S. history and labor literature could become an evergreen paperback comparable to Howard Zinn's award-winning A People's History of the United States.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1565847768
• ISBN 13: 9781565847767
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384