David Roediger teaches history and African American Studies at University of Illinois. He was born in southern Illinois and educated in public schools in that state, with a B.S. in Ed from Northern Illinois University. He completed a doctorate in History at Northwestern in 1979. Roediger has taught labor and Southern history at Northwestern, University of Missouri and University of Minnesota. He has also worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. He has written on U.S. movements for a shorter working day, on labor and poetry, on the history of radicalism, and on the racial identities of white workers and of immigrants. His books include Our Own Time , The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived U.S. History, and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, all from Verso, Colored White (California), and Working Towards Whiteness (Basic). His edited books include an edition of Covington Hall’s Labor Struggles in the Deep South (Kerr), and another of W.E.B. Du Bois’s John Brown (Random House/Modern Library) as well as Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (Schocken). The former chair of the editorial committee of the Charles H. Kerr Company, the world’s oldest radical publisher, he has been active in the surrealist movement, labor support and anti-racist organizing.
The Production of Difference: Race and The Management of Labor in U.S. History, a new book co-written with Elizabeth Esch, will be released in May and can be pre-ordered now through Oxford University Press.
For more information, and a promotional code for 20% off direct orders, view the full announcement below.
FULL ANNOUCEMENT [pdf]
Marking the 125th anniversary of the 1886 bombing at Chicago’s Haymarket Square, a revised and expanded edition of the Haymarket Scrapbook has been released. The new edition, a collaboration between Kerr Company and anarchist publishing house AK Press, preserves the original composition of the 1986 edition and expands the included material to encompass several new essays and articles on the importance of Haymarket for contemporary labor struggles.
This profusely illustrated anthology reproduces hundreds of original documents, speeches, posters, and handbills, as well as contributions by many of today’s finest labor and radical historians focusing on Haymarket’s enduring influence around the world—including the eight-hour workday.
Wages of Whiteness & Racist Symbolic Capital, a new book from Lit-Verlag is available now. Check it out at their site.
Click here for a recent discussion on How Race Survived U.S. History with Pittsburgh’s excellent radio program History for the Future.
Listening to Revolt: Selected Writings of George Rawick is a new book just published by Charles H. Kerr. It can be purchased from Charles H. Kerr, from AK Press, and from other booksellers as well.
Kelefa Sanneh’s recent article “Beyond the Pale” in The New Yorker reviews How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Colonialism to the Obama Phenomenon as well as Nell Irvin Painter’s recent History of White People and Rich Benjamin’s Searching for Whitopia.
Below is a recent talk on race management given at Historical Materialism in Toronto, May 2010.
The article “‘One Symptom of Originality’: Race and the Management of Labour in the History of the United States” written with Elizabeth Esch was recently published in Historical Materialism, Volume 17, Issue 4.
A staggering re-interpretation of the whole course of American history in which the skeletons in the closet walk abroad again.>> more.