Life and Labor brings together the most stimulating scholarship in the field of labor history today. Its fifteen essays explore the impact of industrialization and technology on the lives of working people and their responses to the changes in society over the past one-hundred-fifty years. Focusing on the everyday life of working-class Americans, it discusses such topics as production technology, occupational mobility, industrial violence, working women, resistance to exploitation, fraternal organizations, and social and leisure-time activities. The essays are written in a lively manner accessible to an undergraduate audience and also provide insights and a solid background for graduate students and scholars in the field of American labor and social history. The book presents the work of members of the generation of labor and social historians who matured in the 1970s and who are now establishing themselves as leaders in their fields.

Worker and Community focuses on the social and cultural impact of industrialization in Albany, New York during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. More than a local study, it uses Albany as a laboratory in which to examine this important force in social history. The study looks first at the full range of economic actions in which the city's workers participated between 1850 and 1884—organized strikes, labor riots, public demonstrations, and reform movements. It also examines community influences as workers defined themselves in part through affiliation with a particular ethnic group, church, fraternal society, and political party. The worker's struggle against prison contract labor, as discussed in Greenberg's text, reveals acceptance of the free labor tradition along with an emerging interest-group consciousness.