The University of North Carolina Press

192 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, notes, bibl., index

Cloth

ISBN  978-0-8078-3197-7

Published: May 2008

Paper

ISBN  978-0-8078-5878-3

Published: May 2008

Making a Living

Work and Environment in the United States

By Chad Montrie

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In an innovative fusion of labor and environmental history, Making a Living examines work as a central part of Americans' evolving relationship with nature, revealing the unexpected connections between the fight for workers' rights and the rise of the modern environmental movement.

Chad Montrie offers six case studies: textile "mill girls" in antebellum New England, plantation slaves and newly freed sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, homesteading women in the Kansas and Nebraska grasslands, native-born coal miners in southern Appalachia, autoworkers in Detroit, and Mexican and Mexican American farm workers in southern California. Montrie shows how increasingly organized and mechanized production drove a wedge between workers and nature--and how workers fought back. Workers' resistance not only addressed wages and conditions, he argues, but also planted the seeds of environmental reform and environmental justice activism. Workers played a critical role in raising popular consciousness, pioneering strategies for enacting environmental regulatory policy, and initiating militant local protest.

Filled with poignant and illuminating vignettes, Making a Living provides new insights into the intersection of the labor movement and environmentalism in America.

About the Author

Chad Montrie is assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and author of To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia (from the University of North Carolina Press).

Reviews

"Perfect for the undergraduate classroom. . . . Provides readers new to both labor and environmental history with a succinct introduction to the ways in which American workers across divisions of race, class, and gender used ideas of nature, physical labor within the natural world, and outdoor recreation to negotiate, buffer, and resist the transition from rural to urban life, from preindustrial to industrial labor."
--American Historical Review

"By illuminating the entanglement of past labor and environmental struggles, [Montrie] not only successfully challenges disciplinary boundaries but also shows that there are important precedents for contemporary efforts to unite labor and environmental activism."
--Journal of American History

"An excellent overview of the field of environmental history as it intersects with labor history. . . . Elegantly written. . . . Contains a wealth of stories and major insights. . . . An important invention."
--Left History

"Stimulating, insightful, and relevant."
--Labour/Le Travail

"Makes a convincing argument for a reevaluation of the modern environmental movement, one that includes the efforts of working-class union members."
--West Virginia History

"Making a Living should be greeted with enthusiasm by all those interested in unraveling the interactions between labor and nature in American history. The prose is graceful, the vignettes are poignant, and the subject could not be more important."--Karl Jacoby, Brown University