From the website: "Labor history is a field with new relevance in an era of intensifying scholarly interest in social movements. At its most compelling, labor history is the study of the desires, the imaginaries, the strategies, and the tactics that compel people to act politically in the context of work. Therefore, although labor unions are less prevalent mechanisms for social change than they were fifty years ago, labor history is an archive that has much to teach today’s activists about climate change, white nationalism, the militarization of the border, and gun violence among other contemporary crises. To reveal these insights, astute learners and teachers must work against historical tendencies that have troubled the field of labor history: the tendency to privilege wage labor in industrial workplaces, which makes forced labor, reproductive labor, and women’s labor less visible; the tendency to privilege work in the U.S. northeast and Midwest, which often reifies the Black-white racial binary and obscures the labor of people of indigenous, Asian, or Latin American origin; the tendency to privilege collective bargaining over other political practices, which centers corporations and the state and minimizes the contributions of undocumented people or those in less unionized industries such as service work, sex work, and domestic work. This microsyllabus provides five reading strategies that help reveal U.S. labor history’s most relevant insights while resisting the field’s reductive tendencies. "