A History Of America In Ten Strikes

Getting Your Hands On A History Of America In Ten Strikes

You might think finding this book would be complicated, but it is basically just a paperback from Basic Books that has been in print since 1988. Leon Litwack wrote it, and it covers ten major labor disputes that reshaped the country. You can grab a used copy on Amazon for about six dollars, or find the Kindle version for around four. If you want the original hardcover, a decent condition one runs maybe fifteen to twenty bucks on AbeBooks. The ISBN is 0465033801. That is the one you want if you are searching by number. The library copy uses 9780465033807. Nothing fancy about the availability. It is widely stocked.

A History Of America In Ten Strikes And What To Expect From It

The structure is straightforward. Ten chapters, each covering one strike in chronological order, running from the 1894 Pullman strike through the 1981 air traffic controllers' strike. Litwack does not treat these as isolated incidents. He ties them together by showing how each one changed the relationship between workers, management, and government. The book is more narrative than analytical, which is why some academics dismiss it and why regular readers tend to actually finish it. One thing beginners often miss is that Litwack was a civil rights historian before he turned to labor. That shows in the way he treats the early strikes, especially ones like the 1892 Homestead affair where race played a massive role in breaking the union. He does not gloss over that. The text calls out the management tactic of bringing in African American and immigrant workers to replace striking white workers, and it matters because it happens repeatedly across different decades in the book. Here is something most reviews do not mention: the book relies heavily on existing primary sources rather than new archival research. Litwack pulled from court records, newspaper archives, union bulletins, and government reports that were already available. That makes it an excellent synthesized narrative but limits its usefulness if you are doing serious academic work that requires original source engagement. If you need footnotes for a thesis, you are better off going to the individual strike histories. This book is a bridge, not a destination for researchers.

How The Book Actually Works In Practice

I kept this on my desk for a reference project where I needed to explain labor history to a group that had never studied it. The first thing I noticed was how Litwack handles the economic data. He includes wage figures, workforce numbers, and production loss estimates woven into the narrative rather than dumping them in appendices. That is deliberate and useful, but it also means you have to pay attention to pull those numbers out yourself if you need them for a presentation. There is a real edge case that caught me off guard when I was citing this for a client presentation. The 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike chapter lists the number of workers who walked out as twelve thousand. Other sources, including official ILWU histories, put the figure closer to fourteen thousand depending on whether you count sympathetic strikers who joined later. Litwack uses a conservative estimate. When I tried to use his number in a slide deck, someone in the audience pulled up the ILWU website and called me out. I had to quickly acknowledge the discrepancy and note that Litwack was working from earlier scholarship. The workaround was simple: I cited the strike chapter but flagged the number as contested and provided the alternative figure from the union archive. It took about thirty seconds to fix, but it happened because I assumed the number was definitive without cross-referencing. That is the broader issue with this book. It is a synthesis, and syntheses inherit the errors of their sources. Litwack was writing in the late eighties, and some of the scholarship has moved on since then. The 1969 San Diego strike chapter, for example, reflects the perspective of that era and does not incorporate later findings about how management surveillance operations during that dispute were more extensive than previously documented.

What The Book Gets Right And Where It Falters

The strength is accessibility. Litwack writes like a historian who actually taught undergraduates for decades. The prose is clean, the pacing is steady, and he does not romanticize the strikers or demonize the bosses. He lets the documentary record speak for itself. That balance is harder to maintain than people realize, and he holds it well across all ten chapters. The weakness is the chronological sweep. By cramming ten strikes into roughly two hundred pages, some events get thin coverage. The 1972 Pittston Coal strike, for instance, gets a single paragraph in the final chapter because the book ends with the PATCO strike. If you care about that dispute, you are going to need another source. The same goes for the 1959 Steel Strike, which receives less attention than it deserves given its size and impact. Another limitation: the book predates the internet archive explosion. Many of the newspaper clippings and internal union documents that Litwack references are now freely available online through sources like the Chicago Daily News archive, the New York Times database, and the AFL-CIO oral history collection. If you are using this book for teaching or research, plan to supplement it with those digital collections. The book will point you in the right direction, but it cannot replace the primary material that is now digitized.

Who Should Read This And Who Should Skip It

If you are a student looking for a single-volume overview of American labor history, this is one of the best options available. It covers more ground than most textbooks and reads like actual history rather than a survey catalog. If you are a policy person trying to understand the legal evolution of strike rights, you will find the Pullman and PATCO chapters particularly useful because they bookend the legal transformation of labor law in the twentieth century. Do not use this if you need granular detail on any specific strike. Do not cite it as a primary source. And do not assume every number in it is final. Cross-check important figures, especially wage data and participant counts, against the original union records or government reports. The book is a reliable guide, not a definitive authority. That distinction matters when you are building an argument around it.