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.

Blue-Collar Conservatism examines the blue-collar, white supporters of Frank Rizzo—Philadelphia's police commissioner turned mayor—and shows how the intersection of law enforcement and urban politics created one of the least understood but most consequential political developments in recent American history.

Shankar Ramaswami shows how migrant workers in contemporary India confront myriad hardships. In a metal factory in Delhi, they resist perceived oppression and injustice. In the city and village, they weave close ties to one another. In the cosmological domain, they resist soul-distorting processes in the Kalyug, or the present, decivilizing times.

As poor and working people demanded a redistribution of wealth and power in the mid-twentieth century United States, they pressured Republican politicians to compromise. Kristoffer Smemo shows how, for the next four decades, those compromises forced a bloc of Republicans to articulate their own vision of liberalism.

The first relational study of twentieth-century U.S. guestworker programs from Mexico and the Caribbean, Contracting Freedom explores how 1940s debates over labor programs elided race and empire while further legitimating and extending U.S. domination abroad in the post-World War II era.