• Acknowledgments; Abbreviations used in text and notes; Introduction; 1. The manager's brain under the workman's cap; 2. The common laborer; 3. The operative; 4. The art of cutting metals; 5. White shirts and superior intelligence; 6. 'Our time … belives in change'; 7. Patriots or paupers; 8. 'This great struggle for democracy'; 9. 'A maximum of publicity with a minimum of interference'; Index.

"David Montgomery...both exemplifies and transcends the recent trend toward painstakingly detailed social history...he has undertaken a far vaster project than most contemporary labor historians would attempt: American labor activism of all varieties and locales, from the time when American workers organized the first tentative but recognizable trade unions, in the mid-nineteenth century, to the emergence of the working class as an insurrectionary force during the first two decades of the twentieth century, to its humiliating defeat in the years following the First World War...the closest thing we have...to E.P. Thompson's monumental book, The Making of the English Working Class." Barbara Ehrenreich, in The Atlantic