America Work: Bland and White Labor since 1600
Jacqueline Jones

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Format: Hardcover
Publication Date: February 1998
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A sweeping account of almost 400 years of competition, cooperation, and exclusion, "American Work" tells the epic, tragic story of how blacks were boycotted from significant social transformations in American history--from bound to free labor, from farm work to factory work, from a blue-collar to a white-collar economy. 512 pp. 8,500 print.

A sweeping social history of almost four hundred years of competition, cooperation, and exclusion.

In a New World built on a foundation of tobacco, rice, timber, and peas, human labor was the key to wealth, and colonists knew that most labor was "naturally" unfree. Red, white, and black men, women, and children could all expect "hard usage" by masters, husbands, and fathers. As the wilderness was cultivated and economies stabilized, however, life would get betterfor some.

American Work is the epic, tragic story of how blacks were excluded from significant social transformations in American historyfrom bound to free labor, from farm work to factory work, from a blue-collar to a white-collar economy. Meanwhile whites have characterized blacks simultaneously as lazy and as ruthless competitors for their jobs.

Based on an astounding breadth and depth of research, full of human drama and detail, American Work is a major contribution to the history of race and labor in the United States.

Jacqueline Jones chairs the history department at Brandeis University. She is also the author of Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present ("a seminal work of scholarship" --Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) and The Dispossessed ("a work of great ambition, scope, and moral power" --Nicholas Lemann). Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow won the Bancroft Prize in American History and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.