Historian Phillip Dray, award-winning author of *There is Power in a Union*, examines how the labor movement over time has invoked our nation’s revolutionary ideals—freedom, individualism and liberty—in its exploration of labor, capital, class politics and corporate might. Industry arrived in the early years of our young republic, and with it came a vigorous labor movement that paralleled the path of our nation’s social and cultural history. The American labor movement has endured picket lines, police batons and strikes, and has celebrated the successful creation of fair workers’ rights and safer working conditions.
Philip Dray has been a contributor to *The Boston Globe*, *The New York Times*, *The New York Post*, and *Mother Jones*. From 1994-2000 he was a staff writer at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). He has been an adjunct faculty member at the New School, teaching an undergraduate course, "The History of the Civil Rights Movement." Dray is a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, and has been a Visiting Scholar at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in American Studies, and is a veteran of workshops in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota and Harvard University. Philip Dray is the author of *At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America*, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and made him a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and *Stealing God's Thunder: Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America,* and the coauthor of the New York Times Notable Book *We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi*. He lives in Brooklyn.