Bruce Nelson (historian) - Research

Research

Nelson's research focuses on the formation of the concepts of class, race and nationhood in the United States and Western Europe. Most of his published research has examined these issues in the context of the American labor movement, particularly dock and steel workers' unions. In the last five years, Nelson's work has examined themes of race and class in the Irish American experience. His published works are written from the "new labor history" perspective.

Nelson's 1988 book, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen and Unionism in the 1930s, was widely praised as a breakthrough in the labor history of the influential West Coast dock workers' unions. The work, based on Nelson's Ph.D. dissertation, was praised as the "best analysis" of the 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike. It was cited as "an excellent example of the kind of research that is both needed and possible..." and for documenting "clearly and carefully the use of anti-communism as a subterfuge for anti-unionism." The book received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians (awarded to an author publishing his or her first book).

Nelson's second major work, Divided We Stand, expanded Nelson's interest in the formation of various concepts of "working class." The book focused again on longshoremen but expanded its scope to include workers in New York City, New Orleans and Los Angeles as well as steelworkers in the Midwest. The book was called "a landmark study of race and trade unionism":

Bruce Nelson, in line with David Roediger and others, argues that "the history of the white working class, in its majority, was one of self-definition in opposition to an often demonized racial Other and intense resistance to the quest of African Americans for full citizenship". What makes Divided We Stand unique is that, unlike heavily cultural whiteness studies that have used scant literary evidence to support sweeping theoretical claims, Nelson digs deeply into archival sources and oral interviews to describe real workers and their shop-floor experience in compelling detail.

In more recent years, Nelson has turned his attention away from labor unions and toward Irish Americans as a means of examining shifting concepts of race and class.