A New Working Class traces efforts by Black public-sector workers and their unions to fight for racial and economic justice in Baltimore. Federal policy shifts imperiled their efforts. Officials justified weakening the welfare state and strengthening the carceral state by criminalizing Black residents—including government workers.

The Gospel of Work and Money is the first collection to explore forms of coercive labor education as connected global phenomena across modern history and foreground the many ways that ‘work’ remains the primary pedagogical lens of capital in our present era.

Using the broad categories of work, capitalism, and democracy to reinterrogate the past, contributors to this volume contend, is the only way to understand today’s conflicts over the future of how Americans will work, how capitalism will function, and how the country will be governed.

The Silver Women argues that Black West Indian women made the construction of the Panama Canal possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. The book links this labor to the histories of U.S. imperial infrastructure, the global Caribbean diaspora, and women’s own survival.

Tracing the parallel rise of antislavery movements with working-class demands for economic equality, access to the soil, and the right to the fruits of labor, Sean Griffin shows how labor reformers and radicals made invaluable contributions to the antislavery project in the decades before the Civil War.