David Roediger

David Roediger is Kendrick Babcock Chair of History at the University of Illinois. Among his books are Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (with Philip S. Foner), How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon, and The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. He is the editor of Fellow Worker: The Life of Fred Thompson, The North and Slavery and Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White as well as a new edition of Covington Hall’s Labor Struggles in the Deep South. His articles have appeared in New Left Review, Against the Current, Radical History Review, History Workshop Journal, and The Progressive.

Check out David Roediger’s presidential address from ASA 2015:
Making Solidarity Uneasy; Promises and Presumptions From Bacon’s Rebellion to the Present.

• Book events
• Reviews
• More from David

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Praise

“This engaging anthology features the lyrics to 250 or so Wobbly songs, rich with references to job sharks, shovel stiffs, capitalist tools, and plutocratic parasites. Wobbly wordsmiths such as the fabled Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim, Haywire Mac, and Richard Brazier set their fighting words to popular tunes of the day, gospel hymns, old ballads and patriotic anthems.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“This collection, the last major work both of the late ‘laborlorist’ Archie Green and of the late surrealist poet and labor publisher Franklin Rosemont, should be of great value to folklorists, activists, and singers alike.”
—Journal of American Folklore

“In The Big Red Songbook, the editors have thoughtfully documented twentieth-century Wobbly song in all of its foot-stompin’ glory.”
—International Labor and Working-Class History

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Praise

“Joe Hill has finally found a chronicler worthy of his revolutionary spirit, sense of humor, and poetic imagination.”
—Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

“Rosemont’s treatment of Joe Hill is passionate, polemical, and downright entertaining. What he gives us is an extended and detailed argument for considering both Hill and the IWW for their contributions toward creating an autonomous and uncompromising alternative culture.”
—Gordon Simmons, Labor Studies Journal

“Magnificent, practical, irreverent and (as one might say) magisterial, written in a direct, passionate, sometimes funny, deeply searching style.”
—Peter Linebaugh, author of Stop, Thief!

“Rosemont seems to have hunted down every available detail of Hill’s short life and abiding legend.”
—Los Angeles Times

“It has been a long time since so much new material on Joe Hill and the Wobblies has been collected in one volume. All students of the IWW, labor cartoons and songs, radical humor, and the history of blue-collar countercultures in the U.S. will find this book indispensable.”
—Salvatore Salerno, editor of The Big Red Songbook

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Book Events

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Reviews

• The Protest Songs That Drove the Wobblies a Century Ago Are Still Lighting Fires
• Joe Hill Again!

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Interviews

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Mentions

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Blog

• http://www.davidroediger.org/