Herbert Gutman

During this time, he conducted most of the research for his massive, path-breaking work, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925.

His thesis studied the Panic of 1873 and its effects on New York City, and focused heavily on workers' demands for public works.

It was written under the supervision of Richard Hofstadter.

Gutman later dismissed it as "boring conventional labor history."

His doctoral dissertation was on American labor during the Panic of 1873 and supervised by Howard K. Beale.

During this time, Gutman worked with the eminent labor scholars Merrill Jensen, Merle Curti, and Selig Perlman, who had turned the University of Wisconsin–Madison into the cradle of modern American labor studies.

He later married Judith Mara and they had two daughters.

Herbert George Gutman (1928–1985) was an American professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he wrote on slavery and labor history.

Gutman was born in 1928 to Jewish immigrant parents in New York City; he was deeply influenced by their leftism.

He attended John Adams High School and graduated with a bachelor's degree from Queens College in 1948.

During his teens and his college years, Gutman became involved in numerous left-wing and labor causes and worked for the Wallace presidential campaign.

He received a master's degree in history from Columbia University.

But by the late 1950s, he had moved away from Marxism.

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 he later admitted, this conclusion was wrong.

Gutman was awarded a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1959.

Gutman then took a position teaching history at the State University of New York at Buffalo beginning in 1963.

At SUNY-Buffalo, he 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."

When 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, but also cemented his already-considerable reputation.

Gutman left SUNY-Buffalo in 1966 to take a job at the University of Rochester.

Gutman left the 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 US.

It produced a film, a series of slide shows, and a two-volume history of working people in the United States entitled Who Built America?

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.

Herbert Gutman focused on the history of workers and slaves in the United States.

He is considered one of the co-founders and primary proponents of the "new labor history," a school of thought that believes ordinary people have not received the proper amount of attention from historians.

He developed a critique of the "Commons school" of labor history that focused on markets and minimized other factors such as technological or cultural changes and working people themselves.

Gutman has been criticized for his quasi-Marxist theoretical leanings.

It is clear that at one time he may have been an academic Marxist.