Reflections on the Recent Course of Labor History

Abstract

I was among the first generation of New Labor Historians that in the mid-1960s decisively and selfconsciously broke with the Old Labor History. In truth, by the time I entered graduate school in 1965, Commons-style labor history, the Old Labor History, was already on life-support. Commons himself had died 20 years earlier, and Selig Perlman, his most illustrious student, published his last book in 1950, roughly a decade before his own death. Perlman’s students, who comprised the third generation, did not leave much of an academic imprint.