David R Roediger

David Roediger

David R. Roediger (July 13, 1952) is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research interests include the construction of racial ...

Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White

In this thought-provoking volume, David R. Roediger has brought together some of the most important black writers throughout history to explore the question: What does it really mean to be white in America?From folktales and slave narratives to contemporary essays, poetry, and fiction, black writers...

Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past

David R. Roediger's powerful book argues that in its political workings, its distribution of advantages, and its unspoken assumptions, the United States is a "still white" nation. Race is decidedly not over. The critical portraits of contemporary icons that lead off the book--Rush Limbaugh, Bill Cli...

The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Haymarket Series)

Combining classical Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the new labor history pioneered by E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman, David Roediger’s widely acclaimed book provides an original study of the formative years of working-class racism in the United States. This, he argues, cannot be explained simply wi...

Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (Haymarket Series)

Towards the Abolition of Whiteness collects David Roediger’s recent essays, many published here for the first time, and counts the costs of whiteness in the past and present of the US. It finds those costs insupportable. At a time when prevailing liberal wisdom argues for the downplaying of race in ...

The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History

In 1907, pioneering labor historian and economist John Commons argued that U.S. management had shown just one "symptom of originality," namely "playing one race against the other." In this eye-opening book, David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch offer a radically new way of understanding the history of m...

Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs

At the vanguard of the study of race and labor in American history, David R. Roediger is the author of the now-classic The Wages of Whiteness, a study of racism in the development of a white working class in nineteenth-century America. In Working Toward Whiteness, he continues that history into the ...

How Race Survived US History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon

In this absorbing chronicle of the role of race in US history, David R. Roediger explores how the idea of race was created and recreated from the 1600’s to the present day. From the late seventeenth century—the era in which DuBois located the emergence of “whiteness”—through the American revolution ...

Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All

Forceful and detailed account of the struggle for “freedom” after the American Civil War How did America recover after its years of civil war? How did freed men and women, former slaves, respond to their newly won freedom? David Roediger’s radical new history redefines the idea of freedom after the ...

Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States

John Brown

The Big Red Songbook

The Big Red Songbook

History Against Misery

Our Own Time : A History of American Labor and the Working Day

Culture, Gender, Race, and U. S. Labor History

Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past