If in some ways the least heralded of the pivotal figures of the 1950s and 1960s, he was, ironically, perhaps the most productive and wide ranging. Dubofsky was at the centre of all of this. It produced, in solitary and haphazard ways, scholarship of extraordinary depth and richness nonetheless. Labour history, as we now know it, was not born of proselytizing zeal, of large conferences and cultivated networks and study groups and connections turned to securing grants. Those who now find much wanting in labour history, and offer their critiques of the field from sinecures secured with relative ease and little of the pain of varied institutionalized rejections, should read Dubofsky’s account of these years to understand the development of an academic area they have come to regard as politically inadequate.

It was not an entirely pretty picture, emerging as it did in the shadow of McCarthyism, first, and parochial pseudo-intellectual antagonism to a scholarship focused on workers and radicalism, second. More than a compilation of some of Dubofsky’s essays, this book is introduced by an exceedingly important memoir, a “confessional” account of what it was like charting new terrain in earlier years. Gutman, David Montgomery, David Brody, and Alice Kessler-Harris, Dubofsky researched, wrote about, and taught courses in labour history at a time when the field was not in fashion and there was little appreciation and support for the study of workers and their pasts. This book takes us back to previous writings of Melvyn Dubofsky, who is one of the five major labour historians who pioneered new approaches to working-class experience in the 1950s and 1960s.

John L. Lewis by Melvyn Dubofsky