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The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class » (Revised)

Book cover image of The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class by David R. Roediger

Authors: David R. Roediger, Kathleen Cleaver
ISBN-13: 9781844671458, ISBN-10: 1844671453
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Verso
Date Published: July 2007
Edition: Revised

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Author Biography: David R. Roediger

David Roediger

is Kendrick Babcock Chair of History at the University of Illinois. Among his books are Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (with Philip S. Foner), How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon, and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. He is the editor of Fellow Worker: The Life of Fred Thompson, The North and Slavery and Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White as well as a new edition of Covington Hall’s Labor Struggles in the Deep South. His articles have appeared in New Left Review, Against the Current, Radical History Review, History Workshop Journal, The Progressive and Tennis.

Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Magical Urbanism. He was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in Papa'aloa, Hawaii.

Michael Sprinker was Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the History of Historical Materialism and History and Ideology in Proust are also published by Verso. Together with Mike Davis, he founded Verso's Haymarket Series and guided it until his death in 1999.

Book Synopsis

An original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States.

Table of Contents

Textual Note
Acknowledgements
Pt. IIntroducing the White Worker
1On Autobiography and Theory: An Introduction3
2The Prehistory of the White Worker: Settler Colonialism, Race and Republicanism before 180019
Pt. IIRace and the Languages of Class from the Revolution to the Civil War
3'Neither a Servant Nor a Master Am I': Keywords in the Languages of White Labor Republicanism43
4White Slaves, Wage Slaves and Free White Labor65
Pt. IIIWork, Culture and Whiteness in Industrializing America
5Class, Coons and Crowds in Antebellum America95
6White Skins, Black Masks: Minstrelsy and White Working Class Formation before the Civil War115
7Irish-American Workers and White Racial Formation in the Antebellum United States133
Pt. IVThe Limits of Emancipation and the Fate of Working Class Whiteness
8Epilogue: A New Life and Old Habits167
Afterword to the Revised Edition185
Index191

Subjects