What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels · 56 pages
"The Communist Manifesto," penned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is a revolutionary treatise advocating for the overthrow of capitalist systems and the establishment of a classless society. Published in 1848, its succinct yet powerful prose remains a cornerstone of socialist ideology, inspiring movements worldwide.
A People's History of the United States
Howard Zinn · 702 pages
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, *A People's History of the United States* is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
Silvia Federici · 285 pages
Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class
Noam Scheiber · 384 pages
Germinal
Emile Zola · 496 pages
The thirteenth novel in Emile Zola's great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity's capacity for compassion and hope.Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he disco
Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939
Lizabeth Cohen · 526 pages
This book examines how it was possible and what it meant for ordinary factory workers to become effective unionists and national political participants by the mid-1930s. We follow Chicago workers as they make choices about whether to attend ethnic benefit society meetings or to go to the movies, whether to shop in local neighborhood stores or patronize the new A & P. Although workers may not have
Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880
W.E.B. Du Bois · 765 pages
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
Nancy Isenberg · 460 pages
A history of poor whites in America, mainly in the South.
The Condition of the Working Class in England
Friedrich Engels · 336 pages
"The Condition of the Working Class is the best-known work of Engels, and in many ways still the best study of the working class in Victorian England. It was also Engels's first book, written during his stay in Manchester from 1842 to 1844. Manchester was then at the very heart of the Industrial Revolution and Engels compiled his study from his own observations and detailed contemporary reports. T
North and South
Elizabeth Gaskell · 450 pages
When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the north of England. Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new surroundings in the industrial town of Milton, Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of the local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice. Thi
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair · 342 pages
Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was c
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck · 553 pages
Steinbeck’s classic novel of the Great Depression is as vivid now as ever. The story focuses on a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers, farmers who work another man’s land for a share of the crops. Driven from their home by drought and poverty they take to the road in a battered old truck and make their way to California to look for work. When they arrive they find hundreds of others like them being f
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Barbara Ehrenreich · 240 pages
The author's experience holding low-wage jobs in three parts of the U.S. in the late 1990s.
The Road to Wigan Pier
George Orwell · 230 pages
A searing account of George Orwell's observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growi
The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500–2000
John Tutino · 512 pages
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Pierre Bourdieu · 613 pages
Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983
Barbara Kingsolver · 224 pages
Novelist Barbara Kingsolver began her writing career with Holding the Line. It is the story of how women's lives were transformed by an eighteen-month strike against the Phelps-Dodge Copper Corporation. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, the story is partly oral history and partly social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment which occurs when people work together as a community.
Europe and the People Without History
Eric R. Wolf · 503 pages
The People of the Abyss
Jack London · 224 pages
Book of Jack London about life in the East End of London in 1902. He wrote the experiences of living in the East End for months, staying in workhouses or sleeping on the streets. The conditions he experienced and wrote would be the same as would have supported an estimated 500,000 poor in London at the time.
Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth-Century to Modern Times
Lucy Lethbridge · 385 pages
From the immense staff running a lavish Edwardian estate and the lonely maid-of-all-work cooking in a cramped middle-class house to the poor child doing chores in a slightly less poor household, servants were essential to the British way of life. They were hired not only for their skills but also to demonstrate the social standing of their employers -- even as they were required to tread softly an
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression
Robin D.G. Kelley · 392 pages
A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: d
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Charles Mackay · 410 pages