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Joshua B. Freeman

Joshua B. Freeman - Distinguished Professor - profile photo

Research Interests

  • U.S. Labor History; 20th Century U.S. History

Education

  • Ph.D. Rutgers University

Contact

Affiliated Campus(es)

  • Queens College

Selected Publications

  • Democratic socialism all around: What Bernie Sanders’ New York can teach us about America’s future (op-ed in the New York Daily News)
  • Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (New York:  Norton, 2017).
  • “DeBlasio’s New York,’” Dissent, Winter 2015, 29-35
  • American Empire, 1945-2000: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 2012) (Penguin History of the United States)
  • Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: The New Press, 2000.)
  • In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933-1966 (New Edition, Temple University Press, 2001.)
  • Audacious Democracy:  Labor, Intellectuals, and the Social Renewal of America, co-editor with Steve Fraser (Houghton Mifflin, 1997.)
  • Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society Vol. II, Co-authored with David Bensman, Bruce Levine, Nelson Lichtenstein, David Brundage, Susan Benson and Brian Palmer, (Pantheon Books, 1992.)

Book Chapters/Articles/Reviews/Essays:

  • "Lindsay and Labor," in America's Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York, edited by Sam Roberts, Columbia University Press and the Museum of the City of New York, 2010

  • "Sliding through the Seventies," in New York 400, Running Press and the Museum of the City of New York, 2009

  • "The Persistence and Demise of Ethnic Union Locals in New York City after World War II," Journal of American Ethnic History, Spring 2007

  • "Anatomy of a Strike: New York City Transit Workers Confront the Power Elite," New Labor Forum, Fall 2006

  • "Labor During the American Century: Work, Workers, and Unions Since 1945," in Blackwell Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. by Roy Rosenzweig and Jean-Christophe Agnew (Blackwell Publishers, 2002)

  • “Red New York,” Monthly Review, July-August 2002

  • "The Strike Weapon: Can it Still Work?," Dissent, Spring 1997

  • "Hardhats: Construction Workers, Manliness, and the 1970 Pro-War Demonstrations," Journal of Social History, June 1993. (Reprinted in The United States in the Twentieth Century Vol. II, 6th ed. by James S. Olson, Robert D. Marcus, David Burner, St. Martin's Press, 1995.)

  • "The Education of an Anti-Communist: Father John F. Cronin and the Balitmore Labor Movement," co-authored with Steven Rosswurm, Labor History, Summer 1992.

  • "Putting Conservatism Back into the 1960s," in "Teaching the Sixties:  A Symposium," Radical History Review, 44 (spring 1989)

  • "Catholics, Communists, and Republicans:  Irish Workers and the Organization of the Transport Workers Union," in Daniel Walkowitz and Michael Frisch, eds., Working-Class America:  Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society, University of Illinois Press, 1983 (Reprinted in American Communism, ed., by Harvey Klehr, Carlson Publicing, Inc.)

Works in Progress:

  • The United States Since 1945 (Penguin History of the United States, Vol. 5)

Series Editor/Editoral Boards:

  • Editorial Board, International Labor and Working-Class History

  • Consulting editor, New Labor Forum

Joshua B. Freeman - Distinguished Professor - profile photo

Contact

Affiliated Campus(es)

  • Queens College

Books

Behemoth-by-Joshua-Freeman_1 book cover

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World 1st Edition

by Joshua B. Freeman Distinguished Professor, History

We live in a factory-made world: modern life is built on three centuries of advances in factory production, efficiency, and technology. But giant factories have also fueled our fears about the future since their beginnings, when William Blake called them "dark Satanic mills." Many factories that operated over the last two centuries―such as Homestead, River Rouge, and Foxconn―were known for the labor exploitation and class warfare they engendered, not to mention the environmental devastation caused by factory production from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution up to today.

In a major work of scholarship that is also wonderfully accessible, celebrated historian Joshua B. Freeman tells the story of the factory and examines how it has reflected both our dreams and our nightmares of industrialization and social change. He whisks readers from the textile mills in England that powered the Industrial Revolution and the factory towns of New England to the colossal steel and car plants of twentieth-century America, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union and on to today’s behemoths making sneakers, toys, and cellphones in China and Vietnam.

The giant factory, Freeman shows, led a revolution that transformed human life and the environment. He traces arguments about factories and social progress through such critics and champions as Marx and Engels, Charles Dickens, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Ford, and Joseph Stalin. He chronicles protests against standard industry practices from unions and workers’ rights groups that led to shortened workdays, child labor laws, protection for organized labor, and much more.

In Behemoth, Freeman also explores how factories became objects of great wonder that both inspired and horrified artists and writers in their time. He examines representations of factories in the work of Charles Sheeler, Margaret Bourke-White, Charlie Chaplin, Diego Rivera, and Edward Burtynsky.

Behemoth tells the grand story of global industry from the Industrial Revolution to the present. It is a magisterial work on factories and the people whose labor made them run. And it offers a piercing perspective on how factories have shaped our societies and the challenges we face now.

Published February 2018
W. W. Norton & Company, 2018

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(Penguin History of the United States)

American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home 1945-2000

(Penguin History of the United States)

by Joshua B. Freeman Distinguished Professor, History

 

This portrait of the United States shows a nation both galvanized by change and driven by conflict. The economic juggernaut awakened by World War II transformed a country once defined by its regional character into a uniform and cohesive power and set the stage for the United States' rise to global dominance. Yet over the years, Freeman sees a profound tragedy shaping the path of American civic life: after decades of work by the civil rights and labor movements to expand the rights of millions of Americans, power has slipped from the hands of individual citizens into those of private corporations. Freeman's sweeping story of a nation's rise reveals forces at play that will continue to affect American influence and might in the greater world. 

Published August 2012
Viking Components, 2012

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