A History of Trade Unionism in the United States

Selig Perlman's 1922 masterwork emerges from the heart of the Progressive Era, when the battle between labor and capital was still raw and unresolved. Written as part of John R. Commons's influential labor history research project at the University of Wisconsin, this book captures something no later synthesis can: the living memory of workers who built American unionism from nothing. Perlman traces the messy, violent, often desperate struggle of laborers to organize against overwhelming odds. From the first genuine strikes in the late 1700s through the Knights of Labor's dramatic rise and fall, from the establishment of permanent trade societies to the fractured landscape of competing unions, he documents how workers forged solidarity across trades and regions despite relentless employer hostility and constant threat of blacklisting. This is labor history from inside the fight, not observed from a safe distance. It reveals the human cost behind collective bargaining: the strike leaders who risked everything, the immigrant workers who brought union traditions from Europe, the fragile victories and devastating defeats that made modern American labor possible.