Teaching Labor History in the United States, 1850-2020

The story of labor in the United States is a story of the nation’s identity and lived experience—a dynamic and evolving narrative of resilience, progress, and collective struggle. Yet, despite its profound significance, labor history remains a marginalized topic within the standard social studies curriculum for grades 6–12. This volume, Teaching Labor History in the United States, 1850-2020, is an effort to address this gap and to bring this multifaceted history into the classroom in a way that is both scholarly rigorous and deeply practical for educators.

The motivation for this work arises from two primary ideas. First, labor history encompasses far more than industrial strikes and legislative milestones; it is an interconnected web of social, cultural, and economic forces that have shaped the American experience. Second, in an era where social studies curricula are often constrained by standardized expectations, teachers need both accessible scholarly resources and adaptable pedagogical strategies to enrich their lessons. This volume is an invitation to expand the narrative of U.S. history education by integrating labor history as an essential lens through which students can understand the past and grapple with the complexities of the present.

This book gathers the work of dedicated scholars and educators, each contributing a chapter that merges historical analysis with actionable classroom tools. Each chapter presents a substantive essay grounded in rigorous research and scholarly citations, providing readers with an academic foundation for understanding key themes and events in labor history. Following the essay, contributors offer pedagogical strategies tailored to 6–12 classrooms, including lesson plans that align with educational standards while encouraging critical thinking and engagement. Chapters conclude with integrative summaries that bridge the gap between scholarly insights and their classroom application.

Thank you to the peer reviewers for reviewing the individual manuscripts for this volume and for reviewing the complete volume. Thank you to Series Editor Dr. Caroline R. Pryor (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) for chairing the Editorial Advisory Board of the Teaching Critical Themes in American History Series that reviewed this volume and provided constructive critiques at each step of the process for this book project.

Adam I. Attwood

This volume addresses labor history across time as an interconnected process. The teaching of labor history in secondary schools seems to have a renewed sense of urgency as artificial intelligence (AI) emerges as a major change factor in how society envisions labor and people’s relationship to their labor. In thinking about the First Industrial Revolution and the Second Industrial Revolution, there was a social process at work in which more and more individuals moved from small rural communities into more concentrated living conditions that formed ever larger urban communities. As the factory system emerged and employed more people than in rural agriculture, labor unions emerged in larger numbers. Though guilds had existed for many centuries, the nineteenth-century labor union concept was a new economy of scale. Labor union expansion and retraction cycles continued throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. New technologies are just one of several factors affecting people’s conceptualization of labor and the organization of labor. Throughout these strands of labor history has been something of a “social algorithm.” This concept is adapted from a historical analysis of industrialization in the context of labor trends analysis (De Vries, 2003). When teaching high school students about industrialization, the factors affecting labor must be referenced. In discussing labor then, marketable goods must be referenced, which requires an explanation of market dynamics. As shown in Figure A, illustrative explanations may be required to explain complex dynamics affecting labor. As such, this could be called a social algorithm. The purchased goods should be thought of as ranging from items requiring very little household labor before they are transformed to the consumable Z commodities (e.g., textiles), to those (e.g., wool) that require extensive household labor before the transformation to a Z commodity is complete.

As shown in Figure A, an interpretation of De Vries’ (2003) explanation of industrialization suggested a social algorithm in which cause-and-effect relationships are theorized as part of continuity and change over time. In this example interpretation, rural agricultural labor might have had many jobs but low relative efficiency when trying to feed a growing population. As industrialization started, technologies affected labor efficiencies. Workers could go from a one-to-one laborer to finished product unit ratio, to a much higher ratio with the factory system; but for that to occur, people needed to centralize which led to the substantial growth of urban centers. As rural laborers relocated to towns, which then became cities, wages were part of the enticement to relocate. However, for factories to maintain their economic efficiency, wages were lower than the input unit costs to produce a finished product for markets as consumable goods. The factory laborers were also consumers, and so the concentration of people in cities increased microeconomic demand affecting macroeconomic pressures on the supply-side, reaching a tipping point triggering the Second Industrial Revolution. The increase in supply through more technologically efficient use of labor in producing consumable goods for the market lowered per-unit costs, increasing affordability for more people which increased demand. As transaction costs also lowered, the cycle continued upward and expanded. The Z commodity is an algebraic symbol here for a finished product, but it must be at a market for consumer access transforming Z in the consumable product also known as Y (e.g., ∑ = T ~ S +/− Z = Y). This is using algebraic notation to signify social processes and is not strictly a mathematical formula. In a way, this is adapting fuzzy logic to social processes that may not be replicable from a technical social science methodological perspective (Freese & Peterson, 2017); rather, this explanation is a social science-informed historical logic puzzle. The explanation here is an example of replicating a discussion of historical process using the same sources.