From Alienation to Addiction

Peter N. Stearns is Provost and Professor of History at George Mason University. He has taught previously at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Rutgers, and Carnegie Mellon. He has published widely both in modern social history, including the history of emotions, and in world history.

• Chapter 1 Introduction: Analyzing Work as an Experience; Chapter 2 Work in Premodern Societies; Chapter 3 Work and the American Tradition; Chapter 4 The Impact of Industrialization; Chapter 5 Modern Work the American Way; Chapter 6 Rearranging Modern Work: The Young, the Old, and the Female; Chapter 7 Global Trends in the Past Half Century: The Industrialization of the World; Chapter 8 A Workaholic Nation? The Past Half Century; Chapter 9 Conclusion: Work Issues in the Present and Future;

“Are Americans workaholics or industrious? Is work fulfilling or does it drive us crazy? When does a ‘right to work’ become a ‘need to work’? It takes a master historian like Peter Stearns to successfully take us across two centuries and three continents for answers. Every student—and a lot of us who are already in the work force and wonder why we don't have us much vacation time as Europeans—needs to read and think about this nuanced and often surprising account of changing work patterns and attitudes.” —Daniel Walkowitz, New York University, author of Working with Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity “The book has all the features one anticipates from a work by Peter Stearns—lucid synthesis, acute judgments, and an exceptionally broad coverage of space and time.” —Daniel T. Rodgers, Princeton University, author of The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 “With crystalline prose and a touch of wry humor, Stearns dispatches with a monumental task; he is the first to look back on the history of industrial work from its pre-modern beginnings through the lens of present-day concerns with overwork, immigration, technological redundancy, as well as the peculiarities of American workplace complaints.” —Leon Fink, University of Illinois–Chicago, author of In Search of the Working Class: Essays in American Labor History and Political Culture