Labor's Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life (Working Class in American History) - Hardcover

Higbie, Tobias

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252042263 ISBN 13: 9780252042263

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2018

Synopsis

Business leaders, conservative ideologues, and even some radicals of the early twentieth century dismissed working people's intellect as stunted, twisted, or altogether missing. They compared workers toiling in America's sprawling factories to animals, children, and robots. Working people regularly defied these expectations, cultivating the knowledge of experience and embracing a vibrant subculture of self-education and reading. Labor's Mind uses diaries and personal correspondence, labor college records, and a range of print and visual media to recover this social history of the working-class mind. As Higbie shows, networks of working-class learners and their middle-class allies formed nothing less than a shadow labor movement. Dispersed across the industrial landscape, this movement helped bridge conflicts within radical and progressive politics even as it trained workers for the transformative new unionism of the 1930s. Revelatory and sympathetic, Labor's Mind reclaims a forgotten chapter in working-class intellectual life while mapping present-day possibilities for labor, higher education, and digitally enabled self-study.

About this title

About the Author

Tobias Higbie is a professor of history at UCLA. He is the author of Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252042263
• ISBN 13: 9780252042263
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 234