City of Workers, City of Struggle

City of Workers, City of Struggle reveals how early colonists, later immigrants, and rural migrants became central to New York City’s manufacturing, trading, and financial industries. Evocatively illustrated, each chapter offers tales of mobilization and resistance experienced by diverse and ever-changing populations of New Yorkers. Together these chapters provide powerful insights into the interdependence of labor and capital. -- Alice Kessler-Harris, coeditor of <i>Democracy and the Welfare State: The Two Wests in the Age of Austerity</i> Written by some of the country's most talented historians, this lavishly illustrated and impressively argued book inverts the usual pattern of viewing New York City's history from the point of view of the rich and powerful. It makes clear that the struggles of workers—artisans and domestic laborers, sailors and garment workers, public employees and men and women in health care—were essential to making New York a bastion of progressivism. No account of history could be more relevant to our current moment. -- Eric Foner, Columbia University At last! A pathbreaking history of New York laborers that runs from colonial-era artisans and slaves to today’s alt-labor organizers. Broadly conceived, it covers not only craft and industrial and white collar workers, but home workers, maritime workers, public workers, sex workers, health care workers, domestic workers, and criminals in the underground economy. It attends not only to unionization, but to the evolving nature of work, housing, leisure, politics, and culture. Vividly written, and copiously illustrated, City of Workers, City of Struggle is a superb and timely introduction to Gotham’s working people, past and present. -- Mike Wallace, coauthor of <i>Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898</i> A richly illustrated work . . . in 16 well-written chapters, various scholars trace labor's role from the Colonial era through the rise of a new contemporary militant labor movement. * Choice *