[Marxism] Back in Print: Mandel's Labor, Free and Slave

[Mark Lause]

This is a very good one to have back in print.

ML


-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Kelly [mailto:b.kelly at qub.ac.uk]
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 6:20 AM
To: Brian Kelly
Subject: Forthcoming from U Illinois Press

Labor, Free and Slave
Workingmen and the Anti-Slavery Movement in the United States
Bernard Mandel
Introduction by Brian Kelly
"This edition will bring historians' attention back to a great but no longer
known work from the past. Brian Kelly's excellent introduction provides a
biography of Mandel, places his book in the context of writings on US
history, and presents the critique of whiteness studies implicit in Mandel's
thought in a clear and provocative fashion."
--David Montgomery, coauthor of Black Workers' Struggle for Equality in
Birmingham
 
An important artefact of Old Left scholarship made available to a new
generation of students and activists Bernard Mandel's classic study provides
a concise overview of the relationship between organized abolitionism and
the fledgling labor movement in the period before the Civil War. Slavery
reinforced the powerlessness of white workers north and south, Mandel
argues, and the racial divisions that it upheld rendered effective labor
solidarity impossible. But deep distrust between abolitionists and the
working classes compelled northern workers to find their own way into the
antislavery ranks.

Bernard Mandel was an independent scholar who also published a biography of
Samuel Gompers. Brian Kelly is Senior Lecturer in the School of History at
Queen’s University Belfast, in Ireland, and the author of Race, Class, and
Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908-1921.
 
MARCH
256 PAGES. 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 INCHES
PAPER, ISBN 978_0_252_07428_8. $25s £14.99
Labor History / African-American Studies