No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY

A “sensitive, immersive, and exhaustive” portrait of Black workers and white hypocrisy in nineteenth-century Boston, from “a gifted practitioner of labor history and urban history” (Tiya Miles, National Book Award-winning author of All That She Carried)

 
Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation’s hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, however, the city was far from a beacon of equality. 
 
In No Right to an Honest Living, historian Jacqueline Jones reveals how Boston was the United States writ small: a place where the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism was easy, but justice in the workplace was elusive. Before, during, and after the Civil War, white abolitionists and Republicans refused to secure equal employment opportunity for Black Bostonians, condemning most of them to poverty. Still, Jones finds, some Black entrepreneurs ingeniously created their own jobs and forged their own career paths. 
 
Highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary Black workers, this book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston—and the United States—from securing true equality for all. 
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No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY

A “sensitive, immersive, and exhaustive” portrait of Black workers and white hypocrisy in nineteenth-century Boston, from “a gifted practitioner of labor history and urban history” (Tiya Miles, National Book Award-winning author of All That She Carried)

 
Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation’s hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, however, the city was far from a beacon of equality. 
 
In No Right to an Honest Living, historian Jacqueline Jones reveals how Boston was the United States writ small: a place where the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism was easy, but justice in the workplace was elusive. Before, during, and after the Civil War, white abolitionists and Republicans refused to secure equal employment opportunity for Black Bostonians, condemning most of them to poverty. Still, Jones finds, some Black entrepreneurs ingeniously created their own jobs and forged their own career paths. 
 
Highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary Black workers, this book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston—and the United States—from securing true equality for all. 
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No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by Jacqueline Jones
No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston's Black Workers in the Civil War Era (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by Jacqueline Jones

Hardcover

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Notes From Your Bookseller

The author of Goddess of Anarchy presents a carefully researched narrative of a dark time in American history through one major city and its pious promises to Black workers.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY

A “sensitive, immersive, and exhaustive” portrait of Black workers and white hypocrisy in nineteenth-century Boston, from “a gifted practitioner of labor history and urban history” (Tiya Miles, National Book Award-winning author of All That She Carried)

 
Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation’s hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, however, the city was far from a beacon of equality. 
 
In No Right to an Honest Living, historian Jacqueline Jones reveals how Boston was the United States writ small: a place where the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism was easy, but justice in the workplace was elusive. Before, during, and after the Civil War, white abolitionists and Republicans refused to secure equal employment opportunity for Black Bostonians, condemning most of them to poverty. Still, Jones finds, some Black entrepreneurs ingeniously created their own jobs and forged their own career paths. 
 
Highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary Black workers, this book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston—and the United States—from securing true equality for all. 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781541619791
Publisher: Basic Books
Publication date: 01/10/2023
Pages: 544
Sales rank: 68,031
Product dimensions: 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Jacqueline Jones is the Ellen C. Temple Professor of Women’s History Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin and the past president of the American Historical Association. Winner of the Bancroft Prize for Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow and a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, she lives in Concord, Massachusetts.
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