Price V. Fishback is the Frank and Clara Kramer Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is the author of Soft Coal, Hard Choices: The Economic Welfare of Bituminous Coal Miners, 1890 - 1930. Shawn Everett Kantor is professor of economics at the University of California, Merced. He is the author of Politics and Property Rights: The Closing of the Open Range in the Postbellum South, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

"This is surely the very best book ever written about the passage of workers' compensation, an instant 'classic' in historical political economy." - Robert A. Margo, Southern Economic Journal "Substantial, well-written, and compelling.... The end result is an in-depth analysis of how workers' compensation was created and initially implemented in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century." - Christopher R. Larrison, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare"