It is a pleasure to join this fiftieth anniversary celebration of historian Herbert G. Gutman's seminal collection of essays, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America. Historians of US and African American urban, labor, and working-class history owe a special debt to Gutman's groundbreaking essay on the Black coal miner and labor leader Richard L. Davis, “The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America.” This essay was first read as a paper at the 1966 meeting of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in Baltimore, Maryland. Before appearing in Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society, the essay was first published in an anthology edited by labor historian Julius Jacobson, The Negro and the American Labor Movement (1968).
Set in the larger context of Gutman's growing interest in a new social history of American workers, initially a focus on Blacks in the United Mine Workers union might...
