Herbert Gutman

Herbert George Gutman (born June 5, 1928 in New York City , † July 21, 1985 ibid) was an American historian and, alongside David Montgomery and David Brody, founder of the new labor history in the United States, which focused on culture and Has social history of workers.

Gutman was influenced by his Jewish parents in his left-wing political views and was politically active as a youth (in Queens) and a student. He studied at Queens College with a bachelor's degree in 1949 and at Columbia University with a master's degree in 1959 with Richard Hofstadter (subject was the economic crisis of 1873 in New York and the demand of workers for employment by the public sector). In 1959 he received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Howard K. Beale with a dissertation that also dealt with the crisis of 1873 and the workers in America. At that time the University of Wisconsin was a center for research into the history of workers in the United States. From 1956 to 1963 he taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University and from 1963 at the State University of New York at Buffalo . Here he came into contact with Edward P. Thompson , who visited the USA in 1964. Gutman examined the influence of Protestantism on the labor movement and increasingly turned to the new labor history, co-founded by Thompson (and away from Marxist approaches). In 1966 he went to the University of Rochester , where he stayed until 1972. During this time he also turned to research on slavery in the United States. From 1972 he was at the City College of New York and from 1975 at its Graduate Center, where he stayed until 1985.

From 1977 to 1980, with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he taught workers' history to unions ( Americans at Work ) with wide acclaim . The success led him to participate in the founding of the American Social History Project at the CUNY Graduate Center. They collected documents and oral history and published films, lecture materials and books.

In 1979 Gutman was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1984 he was a Guggenheim Fellow and taught for the United Negro College Fund at classic US colleges for African Americans.

He was the editor of the Working Class in American History series at the University of Illinois Press with David Montgomery and David Brody .

His 1975 book Slavery and the Numbers Game was harsh criticism of Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman , who believed that the slaves were mostly treated well, would have taken over the Protestant work ethic of their owners and slavery as a whole was economically unprofitable. In the following book, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom , he presented the fates of families of African American slaves and showed that the families in slavery and in the first phase of emigration to the north remained largely intact.

Fonts

• Protestantism and the American Labor Movement, American Historical Review, Volume 72, 1966
• The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925, 1976, Vintage Books 1977
• Power & Culture: Essays, Pantheon Books, 1987.
  • In it u. a. von Gutman: Labor in the Land of Lincoln: Coal Miners on the Prairie, The Workers' Search for Power: Labor in the Gilded Age
• Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of 'Time on the Cross', 1975, University of Illinois Press, 2003.
• Work, Culture and Society, New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
• Editor with Gregory S. Kealey: Many Pasts: Readings in American Social History, 1600–1876, 2 volumes, Prentice Hall 1973

Web links

• Gutman Papers , New York Public Library

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