Class Wars: Race, Class, and Violence in the Long Gilded Age

Abstract

The texts under review here each innovate on existing scholarship in the field of 19th century and early 20th American studies, labor history, and the history of social and class violence in the United States. Three of the texts in question-authored by Kim Moody, Mark A. Lause, and Robert Ovetz-make impressive contributions to our understanding of an often overlooked and frequently oversimplified period in American labor history. Placing them in conversation with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s account of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow is intentional and meant to desegregate the story of industrialized labor conflict from Jim Crow racial capitalism. This common division is due in part to traditional definitions of capitalism and the assumptions of academic disciplines: Reconstruction belongs to historians, and "class conflict" to labor history and leftist scholars who work with more European and masculinized assumptions about the nature of working class history, with feminist and racialized labor studies often relegated to other fields (