100 Books Like Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow

I read this book the summer before I returned to university to complete my B.A. Thompson’s book convinced me that one of my first loves, the study of history, was where I wanted to be.

It is a ground-breaking study of people overlooked, ignored, and condescended to by historians, whose lives were changed by early forms of industrialization in late 18th and early 19th-century England. Thompson treats these people as active agents in shaping their worlds socially, economically, and politically, and he takes their role in “making class” and political activism seriously.

It is also beautifully written, and the depth of his research sets a high standard for subsequent generations of historians.

Stansell’s book brings to life the lives and experiences of working-class women in New York City, a group often ignored by historians. She creates a vivid portrait of the hardships that these women endured as they struggled to survive and often had to make their living in occupations such as domestic service or sex work.

Stansell doesn’t paint them as victims, though, as Stansell points to their agency and strength. Her research is remarkable for its rigor and depth. After reading this book, I had a very different understanding of New York City in this period.

This book is very dear to me because of the author’s breadth of vision, the creativity with which she approached it, and the radical possibilities for women’s lives and gender relations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that she uncovered.

Taylor demonstrates the importance of radical utopianism in challenging traditional notions of gender relations and marriage and introduces us to fascinating women who were part of that process. Her book shows us how new possibilities were considered for society and makes us realize that women’s marginalization in more mainstream socialist parties was not inevitable. Taylor’s writing is elegant and moving.

This book places First Nations and Métis women at the heart of fur trade society and shows that they played crucial roles as workers and wives, mothers, and daughters. Van Kirk creates striking portraits of women whose relationships with fur traders made them important linchpins between their Indigenous and Métis communities and white fur trade society.

The book takes an innovative approach to studying the fur trade in early Canada. Van Kirk also shows how these women’s lives were deeply affected by changes in the fur trade and the coming of settler society to Western Canada.

It’s a beautiful book, from the cover to the notes. It’s a neo-slave narrative that follows various enslaved, then freed people. Through this book, I learned how poetry collections can be explorations of history based on fact.

Like any good collection, reading one poem compels you forward, but each poem can stand on its own. She is a master of form. For instance, her persona poetry is powerful. The first poem in the book, “The Trapper’s Boast,” devoid of empathy, shows the business of slavery from an undesirable point of view. 

But what is moving is the ability to fall in love and to care even in the worst conditions, as well as the will to live and strive towards freedom in spite of any threats.

I started writing neo-slave narrative poems about a woman escaping slavery. I imagined that the poems I was writing, like Suck on the Marrow… show more.

While the origins of northern police in this country were rooted in the development of a new set of class relations among white people, discussions of policing today cannot be untangled from the history of African Americans.

Trotter shows that Black people have always been a crucial part of this country’s workforce. Racism itself is rooted in the ways that Black workers’ position has been shaped by capitalists, non-black workers, and Black workers themselves, and this has been true since the dawn of slavery.

In his last chapters, Trotter brilliantly illustrates how the problems created for the entire working class by the end of the post-World War II economic boom were inflicted out of all proportion on the Black population. In other words, the relatively well-paying jobs were destroyed, and it was Black workers in particular who lost them.

The rise of mass incarceration since the 1970s and the violent… show more.

Based on actual slave documents, Ashley Bryan, through his accomplished paintings and poetry, imagines the lives of eleven men and women sold at auction in 1828. We learn the market prices of the eleven, but Bryan goes deep, showing us the true value of each unique individual. The soul and spirit of this lovely book lay in the astounding resilience, the survival of hope and dreams in the hearts and minds of these enslaved people. Amidst the ugliness of slavery, Bryan manages to leave me uplifted, even joyful — joyful about the unwavering human belief in and desire for freedom.  

Philip J. Schwarz’s Twice Condemned adeptly analyzes the history of enslaved African Americans' relationship with the criminal courts of the Old Dominion from roughly 1700 to the end of the Civil War.  Based on over four thousand trials from the colonial, early national, and antebellum periods, no other book does such a comprehensive job of analyzing the prevalence, longevity, and variety of behavior attributed to slave convicts. This book also provides a detailed picture of how one slave society evolved, and along the way, it uncovers previously unexamined aspects of slave culture, and of slave owners' attitudes toward the "domestic enemy" in their midst.  Schwarz argues that the judicial system for slaves served two purposes: it helped slave owners control slaves and enabled authorities to sanction criminal behavior. This dual function of slave trials mirrored the two kinds of slaves' behavior judges tried to suppress.

When focused on slave… show more.

Anytime I am ever asked about a book on my top list, Du Bois’s book is a staple. Is it over 700 pages? Yes. Was it written over 100 years ago? Almost! Still, Du Bois’ arguments are evergreen.

Written with accessible and some might argue biting language, Du Bois gets to the heart of what the Civil War was really fought over, not slavery, but labor. Before one can get free, you have to know why you were enslaved.

Weaving in her own ancestral history, Kelley knits an extraordinary journey of the Black working class from slavery to our contemporary world—from Georgia to Philadelphia, Florida to Chicago, Texas to Oakland, we engage generations of mostly unheralded workers whose radical genius shaped our labor history and forged nourishing and joyful lives out-of-view of most white accounts of the working class.

Kelley’s prose celebrates and brings to the surface the hidden lives that improved our contemporary world.