Books like Rhythms of Labour — picked by fans

This book was actually written before Baraka’s turn to Marxism, but as a social history of African American music, it is more than exemplary of a style of writing that takes the relationship of cultural form to its conditions seriously.

How Baraka moves between the music and the social conditions of Black musicians changed what I thought engaged musical analysis could be.

Whilst not strictly a book about popular music, but rather two separate but related essays on the modern composers Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, Adorno’s study has been utterly formative for how I understand music and its relationship to its social conditions.

I can’t even fathom how I could think about music without Adorno, and this book is by far his most concerted and concise statement on the subject.

Iton’s book isn’t restricted to popular music but ranges more widely across Black popular cultures.

However, in the ways he understands the historical intersection of popular music and institutional politics (especially in a magisterial chapter on soul music), Iton gave me a way of conceptualizing music as a form of political expression and organization in itself.

Clover’s book is the first I can remember reading that both takes popular music seriously as a form and understands it as an ideological object. His writing is crisp, and he moves smoothly and convincingly from a world-historical event to a particular riff. I think this is one of those books that teaches us that we can both take our revolutionary commitments seriously and love commercial music, too.

This book simply changed the way I do business as a historian and a reader. I love the groundbreaking use of diaries, census records, worker’s memoirs, and library registers to sketch a detailed picture of real books read by real people—not just the official academic record of fine editions with countless mentions of that nameless creature, the “nineteenth-century reader.”

It inspired me to pursue the stories behind the names and comments scratched into abandoned books that find their way onto eBay and the dusty shelves of second-hand bookstores.

On one level, this is a book about housework in the pre-Civil War northern United States. Much more profoundly, it shatters ideas about unpaid labor in early industrial capitalism. It completely changed my—and many readers’—ideas of what constitutes “work,” what it means to contribute to a household economy, and how ideas about wages (and, especially, work done by men outside the home) obscured early capitalists’ dependence on women’s unwaged work. After reading this, you’ll never refer to “women who worked” and “women who didn’t” again. It should be essential reading not only for women’s historians, but for anyone interested in ideologies of labor, capitalism, and the history of work.

[Full disclosure: I met Jeanne Boydston on my second day of graduate school and we collaborated closely on our dissertations (later books). She was my best friend and best teacher until her much-too-early death in 2008.]

I could have mentioned other books written by E.P. Thompson. Each of his books has influenced my work.

Customs and Tradition contains "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism." This brilliant and elegantly written essay shows how capitalism, to impose itself, had to modify the experience of time. This change occurred through numerous conflicts with the traditions and customs of the working classes.

E.P. Thompson teaches us to consider the political importance and emancipatory potential of these struggles and not to leave "tradition" and its energy to the right.

E.P. Thompson taught me to look at these conflicts not just as forms of resistance, but as tensions between mutually incompatible legal systems. A useful corrective to Foucault.

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.

Another fine novel by a great writer who, like me, hailed from Ayrshire. I quote from it in my book. I became aware of William McIlvanney when I attended Kilmarnock Academy between 1967 and 1969 and his first novel Remedy is None was passed around the students in their final year at the school, before heading for University. Having a living, breathing novelist living in the town was really something, and it made us all think that perhaps we could become writers too! All of his books are excellent but Docherty touched me personally because it describes a mining community, similar to the town I grew up in, Galston. It also explores the linguistic tension between Scots and English which is the experience of most people growing up in the Lowlands of Scotland.

I first came across this book as an undergraduate student many years ago. I was drawn to the book because it covered a topic that was not very common at the time, namely the Egyptian working class. Beinin and Lockman’s study of how the working class navigated the three major intellectual currents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—nationalism, religion, and Communism—opened my eyes to social history as no other book had done. Workers on the Nile analyses how Egypt brutally is drawn into the global capitalist system in the nineteenth century and how this process produced a native working class (alongside a large community of European ex-pat workers). Gradually the working class comes of age by organising its labour, and eventually, this gives rise to more radical politics in the shape of Communism, Islamic activism, and nationalist tendencies.