Herbert Gutman - Career

Career

Gutman taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University from 1956 to 1963. Immersing himself in the "new labor history", he researched and wrote a series of community studies about railroad workers, coal miners and ironworkers. During his earliest years as a labor historian, Gutman's thesis was that "workers derived their strength from their small-town milieus and from alliances with class elements unsympathetic to the rising industrialists…" But, as Gutman later admitted, this conclusion was wrong.

Gutman then took a position teaching history at the State University of New York at Buffalo beginning in 1963. At SUNY-Buffalo, Gutman began adapting more statistical and quantitative methodologies to the study of American history. But in 1964, the preeminent British social historian E.P. Thompson came to the United States expressly to visit Gutman. "Gutman's insights into the strengths of working-class resistance to industrial capitalism and the realization that one source of this resistance lay in traditions and ideas derived from previous forms of social organization made Thompson's emphasis on culture and the 'making' of the working class particularly attractive." Gutman's essay "Protestantism and the American Labor Movement" appeared in the American Historical Review in 1966. It not only put him in the forefront of the "new labor history" movement, it also cemented his already-considerable reputation.

Gutman left SUNY-Buffalo in 1966 to take a job at the University of Rochester. During this time, he conducted most of the research for his massive, path-breaking work, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925.

Gutman left the University of Rochester in 1972, and became a professor of history at the City College of New York. He joined CUNY's Graduate Center in 1975, and stopped teaching at City College in 1975 to teach full-time in the graduate program.

In 1977, Gutman received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to teach labor history to union members. The series of lectures, called "Americans at Work," continued until 1980. The lectures attracted widespread attention from unions, workers and Gutman's peers for their engaging style, detail and application to current events in the labor movement.

The enthusiasm generated by the NEH lectures led Gutman to co-found the American Social History Project at CUNY Graduate Center. The project, funded by NEH and the Ford Foundation, began collecting original documents, oral histories, biographies and other historical documentation relating to the history of labor and workers in the U.S.

In 1984, Gutman received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was teaching classes at four historically black colleges for the United Negro College Fund.

Gutman suffered a severe heart attack in late June, 1985, at his home in Nyack, New York. He died five weeks later at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center on July 21, 1985.