Finally available in paperback, Power and Culture is the last work by America’s most influential labor and social historian, the late Herbert Gutman. Edited and introduced by Gutman’s colleague Ira Berlin, the book includes original, unpublished essays from throughout Gutman’s career and important but unavailable works from journals and periodicals, as well as an extended interview with Gutman and a comprehensive bibliography of his works.

Power and Culture features essays on the lives of workers and the formation of class during the “Gilded Age” of American corporations, and on the lives of African American enslaved people and freedmen—the studies for which Gutman became famous. But it also shows the range of his thought on such subjects as Roots and popular historical awareness. With Berlin’s critical and biographical introduction, Power and Culture is an important reappraisal of a major scholar.