We are taught that America is a society based on respect for the law and orderly procedures. That the Constitution stands as a safeguard of individual freedom, and the courts and the police are supposedly established to enforce the law. When a controversial issue arises in the American fabric, it is to be resolved not in the streets but through the democratic processes of elections. Yet, for blacks these liberal values have been turned into their opposites. The courts have most often stood silent in the face of racist violence or have turned their wrath against the victims, not the...

Using documents drawn from newspapers, magazines, and books, this volume provides a documentary history of the relationships between labor and abolitionists from the early 1830s to the Civil War. It includes newspaper articles from mainstream dailies as well as from abolitionist journals and the labor press. The voices heard from include prominent abolitionist leaders, grass roots activists, representatives of the labor movement, land reformers, and utopian advocates of universal reform. The book shows labor's response to such critical episodes as the 1831 Nat Turner Revolt, the...

This contributor volume brings the best work of such established historians as Morris Schappes, Nathan Godfried, and Eric Foner together with the newer voices of Elizabeth Sharpe and Jennifer Bosch. Its eleven essays challenge the boundary between the older, institutional labor history and the more recent social histories of working people. By combining a focus on culture, women's history, and race relations that is characteristic of the best of the latest working class history with an emphasis on formal protests, leadership, and power, the volume suggests that a truly new labor history...