New York Council for the Humanities: Reading Groups: Adult Reading Groups

Working in America: Historical Perspectives

This series explores the lived experience of a handful of American workers and reflects on both the wealth of opportunity and the challenges they encountered in pursuit of the American dream. Each session centers on a book selected by Christopher Cantwell, a graduate student at Cornell University.

The series opens with a discussion of We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber, by Nick Salvatore, which tells the true story of an African American Civil War veteran who worked in a Massachusetts steel mill.

This session focuses on Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, which is based on a scores of interviews with mill workers in the Piedmont South during the early part of the 20th century,

A conversation about Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago 1919-1939, by Lizabeth Cohen, which shows how workers' shifting loyalties, coping mechanisms, and patterns of consumption set the stage for public policies like the New Deal.

The series concludes with a discussion of Ruth Milkman's Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation in WWII, an examination of real-life Rosie the Riveters and the immensely different experiences of men and women in the wartime workplace.