City of Workers, City of Struggle

City of Workers, City of Struggle brings together essays by leading historians of New York and a wealth of illustrations, offering rich descriptions of work, life, and political struggle. It recounts how workers have built formal and informal groups not only to advance their own interests but also to pursue a vision of what the city should be.

Joshua B. Freeman is Distinguished Professor of History at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (2018); American Empire, 1945–2000: The Rise of a Global Power; the Democratic Revolution at Home (2012); and Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (2000).

Mike Wallace, coauthor of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898:
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.

Eric Foner, Columbia University:
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.

Alice Kessler-Harris, coeditor of Democracy and the Welfare State: The Two Wests in the Age of Austerity:
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.