Recent bestsellers by Niall Ferguson and John Keegan have created tremendous popular interest in World War I. In America's Great War prominent historian Robert H. Zieger examines the causes, prosecution, and legacy of this bloody conflict from a frequently overlooked perspective, that of American involvement. This is the first book to illuminate both America's dramatic influence on the war and the war's considerable impact upon our nation. Zieger's engaging narrative provides vivid descriptions of the famous battles and diplomatic maneuvering, while also chronicling America's rise to prominence within the postwar world. On the domestic front, Zieger details how the war forever altered American politics and society by creating the National Security State, generating powerful new instruments of social control, bringing about innovative labor and social welfare programs, and redefining civil liberties and race relations. America's Great War promises to become the definitive history of America and World War I.

Whether as slaves or freedmen, the political and social status of African Americans has always been tied to their ability to participate in the nation's economy. Freedom in the post--Civil War years did not guarantee equality, and African Americans from emancipation to the present have faced the seemingly insurmountable task of erasing pervasive public belief in the inferiority of their race.

For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 describes the African American struggle to obtain equal rights in the workplace and organized labor's response to their demands. Award-winning historian Robert H. Zieger asserts that the promise of jobs was similar to the forty-acres-and-a-mule restitution pledged to African Americans during the Reconstruction era. The inconsistencies between rhetoric and action encouraged workers, both men and women, to organize themselves into unions to fight against unfair hiring practices and workplace discrimination.

Though the path proved difficult, unions gradually obtained rights for African American workers with prominent leaders at their fore. In 1925, A. Philip Randolph formed the first black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to fight against injustices committed by the Pullman Company, an employer of significant numbers of African Americans. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) emerged in 1935, and its population quickly swelled to include over 500,000 African American workers. The most dramatic success came in the 1960s with the establishment of affirmative action programs, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title VII enforcement measures prohibiting employer discrimination based on race.

Though racism and unfair hiring practices still exist today, motivated individuals and leaders of the labor movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries laid the groundwork for better conditions and greater opportunities. Unions, with some sixteen million members currently in their ranks, continue to protect workers against discrimination in the expanding economy. For Jobs and Freedom is the first authoritative treatment in more than two decades of the race and labor movement, and Zieger's comprehensive and authoritative book will be standard reading on the subject for years to come.

The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) encompassed the largest sustained surge of worker organization in American history. Robert Zieger charts the rise of this industrial union movement, from the founding of the CIO by John L. Lewis in 1935 to its merger under Walter Reuther with the American Federation of Labor in 1955. Exploring themes of race and gender, Zieger combines the institutional history of the CIO with vivid depictions of working-class life in this critical period. Zieger details the ideological conflicts that racked the CIO even as its leaders strove to establish a labor presence at the heart of the U.S. economic system. Stressing the efforts of industrial unionists such as Sidney Hillman and Philip Murray to forge potent instruments of political action, he assesses the CIO's vital role in shaping the postwar political and international order. Zieger's analysis also contributes to current debates over labor law reform, the collective bargaining system, and the role of organized labor in a changing economy. |Explores the process of constitution making in each of the thirteen original states and shows that the framers greatly feared arbitrary power and mistrusted legislators' ability to represent the people's interests. For these reasons, they broadened the suffrage and introduced frequent elections as a check against legislative self-interest. Kruman's analysis challenges Gordon Wood's now-classic argument that, at the beginning of the Revolution, the founders placed great faith in legislators as representatives of the people.

At no other time in American history had labor unrest been more evident than the period immediately after World War I. Robert H. Zeiger here recounts the labor problems that faced the Republican administrations of Presidents Harding and Coolidge -- massive strikes, antiracial hysteria, and the hardening of class attitudes throughout the nation -- and describes the programs and policies of Republican leaders -- particularly those of Herbert Hoover -- to solve them. Zeiger finds that while suspicion and animosity between the Republicans and the union leaders persisted, the rising prosperity of the nation, together with the adroit efforts of Hoover and his associates, tended to lessen the influence of extremists in both groups. Labor reached an accommodation of sorts with the Coolidge administration; and when, in 1928, Hoover defeated Al Smith, the substantial labor vote he received was among the factors that lent stature to his victory.

Highly acclaimed and widely read, "American Workers, American Unions" (first published in 1986, revised ed. 1994) provides a concise and compelling history of American workers and their unions in twentieth-century America. This new edition features new chapters on the pre-1920 period, as well as an entirely new final chapter that covers developments of the 1980s and 1990s in detail. There the authors explore how economic change, union stagnation, and antilabor policies have combined to erode workers' standards and labor's influence in the political arena over the last two decades. They review current "alternatives to unionism" as means of achieving fair workplace representations but insist that strong unions remain essential in a democratic society. They argue that labor's new responsiveness to the concerns of women, minority groups, and low-wage workers, as well as its resurgent political activism, offer new hope for trade unionism. Also included in this third edition is new bibliographical material and a regularly updated on-line link to an extended bibliographical essay.

Series Editor: John Milton Cooper, Jr., University of Wisconsin-Madison

This distinguished series provides complete interpretive biographies of influential twentieth-century figures. Based on extensive research and written by a prominent scholar, each concise study examines the subject's career, private life, political milieu, public image, and impact on modern society.