American labour

This highly readable and authoritative narrative history of labor in the United States examines three hundred years of Americans at work and attempts to dis cover what is uniquely "American" about our labor experience and why that experience has been woven insepa rably into the whole story of American civilization.

From the days when bonded servants and free craftsmen helped settle the Colonies, through the turning point of post-Civil War industrialization, past all the crucial stages of labor unionism up to the present, American workers have been united in a seemingly irre sistible quest for an American standard of living. Today, when American work ers enjoy the highest wages in the world. it seems especially appropriate to learn how they pursued and realized that quest.

Mr. Pelling shows us how all the cir cumstances of life in the New World in fluenced the character of labor and the labor movement. He finds that certain features of American life have been par ticularly formative, the high wage ran the geographic diversity of working conditions, the ethnic and racial variety within the laboring force, the agricul tural background of the economy, and the vagueness of social classes. In his discussion of such relevant topics as the problem of Negro slavery, the "safety valve" of the western frontier, mass im migration and union exclusiveness, the frequent alliances between farmers and labor, and the lack of a labor party in America, the author indicates the many and complex ways in which the history of American labor has been tied to the social and economic evolution of the nation. He describes how the fortunes of workingmen and their organizations have been affected by the crises of na tional life-the American Revolution, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the De pression, and the two world wars and how labor, in its turn, has been an active force in shaping the politics and ideals of American society.