Course Description:

Why do we work? What motivates us to work hard? What are our workplace expectations? This course seeks to explore, through directed readings and class discussions, the changing meaning of work in American society over the last two centuries. Given the breadth of the subject matter, the course does not attempt to take a comprehensive approach but rather to introduce some key themes associated with American workers and study them in historical perspective.

The main text and the class’s frame of reference for discussion will be Daniel Jacoby’s Laboring for Freedom, an interdisciplinary study that places the workers’ aspirations for freedom at the center of the history of work in America.  Using Jacoby as a foil, the class will read and discuss works featuring contesting views, i.e., those that focus on issues of the underclass, racism, immigration, poverty and gender bias that have confronted in the work place. The class will explore together how these readings might affect our understanding of the American workers’ historical experience and influence the values that we attach to work.