BIG CONCEPTS
In political economy, this distinction separates labor performed to meet human needs from labor performed to produce commodities for sale.
What is use value vs. exchange value?
Under Spanish rule in the Americas, this system coerced Indigenous labor through forced tribute.
What is the encomienda system?
W. E. B. Du Bois argued that poor white workers received this non-material benefit, undermining interracial class solidarity.
What is the psychological wage?
In the early 19th century, these New England textile factories employed young women under strict moral and labor discipline.
What are the Lowell mills?
This strike started in Martinsburg, WV in 1877 and spread across the country, from Baltimore to San Francisco. It was the nation's largest labor uprising up to that point.
What is the Great Railway Strike of 1877?
This 19th-century ideology held that women belonged in the private, domestic sphere while men participated in public, waged work.
What is the separation of spheres?
In 1680, this Pueblo-led uprising successfully expelled Spanish colonizers from New Mexico for over a decade.
What is Popé’s Rebellion?
In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois described enslaved people’s mass withdrawal of labor during the Civil War using this term.
What is Self-Emancipation as the "General Strike"?
This early-19th-century transformation expanded markets, wage labor, and commercial agriculture in the United States.
What is the Market Revolution?
This massive infrastructure project relied heavily on Chinese immigrant labor under brutal conditions.
What is the Transcontinental Railroad?
This concept refers to labor that sustains life and households rather than producing goods. It may be paid or unpaid.
What is reproductive labor?
This brutal transatlantic journey created a racialized system of hereditary slavery in the Americas.
What is the Middle Passage?
After the Civil War, this agricultural labor system bound formerly enslaved families to land through tenancy and debt.
What is sharecropping?
In the nineteenth century, workers used this phrase to criticize wage labor as a loss of independence and control.
What is wage slavery?
Passed in 1882, this federal law was the first to exclude immigrants based explicitly on race.
What is the Chinese Exclusion Act?
In early modern Europe, this process displaced peasants from shared land, pushing them into dependence on wage labor.
What is the enclosure of the commons?
This legal system treated enslaved people as property that could be bought, sold, and inherited.
What is chattel slavery?
After Reconstruction, Southern states passed these laws criminalizing unemployment to coerce freedpeople into labor.
What are vagrancy laws?
Founded in the 1860s, this was the first national labor federation in the United States.
What is the National Labor Union?
This 1892 steel strike ended in violence and marked a decisive defeat for organized labor.
What is the Homestead Strike?
This form of colonial domination depends on permanent settlement and the displacement of Indigenous peoples, not just extraction of resources.
What is settler colonialism?
A 1662 Virginia law established that enslaved status followed the condition of the mother.
What is partus sequitur ventrem?
A post-Reconstruction system in which Southern states leased incarcerated—overwhelmingly Black—men and women to private employers for profit.
What is convict leasing?
This iron molder led the first national labor federation in the 1860s.
Who is William Sylvis?
This 1894 strike began in a company town and escalated into a national rail shutdown after federal intervention.
What is the Pullman Strike?