American Work travels through 350 years of history to tell the epic, often tragic story of success and failure on the uneven playing fields of American labor. Here is the story of how virtually every significant social transformation in American history (from bound to free labor, from farm work to factory work, from a blue-collar to a white-collar economy) rolled back the hard-won advances of African Americans who had managed to gain footholds in various jobs and industries. It is not a story of simple ideological "racism," but of politics and economics interacting to determine - and determine differently in different times and places - what kind of work was "suitable" to which groups. Jacqueline Jones shows how racially divided workplaces developed, and how efforts to gain or preserve group advantages in certain jobs helped to foster racial hatred and contradictory stereotypes. Ultimately, she reveals in an unmistakable light how systematic forms of discrimination have denied whole groups of Americans the opportunity to compete for jobs, training, and promotions on an equal footing.

Part I: Insubordinates: servants and slaves in a militarized age. Places of labor's "hard usage" in the South before slavery -- Memory and misery: white servants and the origins of slavery in the South -- The work of insurrection: black and white labor in the eighteenth-century South -- "Domestik enemies": bound laborers in New England and the Middle Colonies, 1620-1776 -- The emergence of free labor, fettered in the North -- American work: a photo essay -- Part II: Workers and overworkers: black and white labor in the era of slavery. Black and white hands in a slaveholders' republic, 1790-1860 -- The racial politics of Southern labor in peacetime and war, 1820-1870 -- White men "in a tight place": black poverty and black protest in the antebellum North -- White citizens and black denizens: workers in the North during the era of the Civil War. Part III: The rise and decline of the racialized machine: technological and political change in the workplace. The modernization of prejudice: economic change and the social division of labor, 1870-1930 -- Can you see a tomorrow there? industrial transformation and Federal civil rights legislation, 1929-1978 -- Industrial devolution and the persistence of the "race watch" at the end of the twentieth century -- Families, fraternities, and sites of diversity: affirmative action in historical perspective.