I first encountered Herbert Gutman's work as a PhD student at the University of Oxford in 1988 when I was working on my thesis comparing the experiences of the German Social Democrats and the British Labour Party during the first three decades of the twentieth century.1 A friend of mine introduced Gutman to me with these words: “This is the American E. P. Thompson.” When I first read Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, its author had already been dead for almost three years, but his reputation was huge. Memory is a fickle thing, but if I recall it correctly thirty-five years later, I was as impressed with Gutman as I was with Thompson. Not only did I cherish both as engaged historians—Thompson's campaigning on behalf of European Nuclear Disarmament and Gutman's work with trade unionists, on the American Social History Project and his teaching at Black...

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