{"id":343991,"date":"2025-12-14T16:59:51","date_gmt":"2025-12-14T16:59:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/american-history\/john-laslett-a-scholarly-remembrance\/"},"modified":"2025-12-14T16:59:51","modified_gmt":"2025-12-14T16:59:51","slug":"john-laslett-a-scholarly-remembrance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=343991","title":{"rendered":"John Laslett: A Scholarly Remembrance"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Labor historian John Laslett died on March 23rd, 2025 at the age of 91. He will be remembered for his scholarly engagement with the history of radicalism, immigration, and Los Angeles community and labor history. He was part of a scholarly\u00a0 cohort who created and expanded the field of labor history.<\/p>\n
Laslett began his career in 1961 with a brief teaching appointment at the University of Liverpool, then spent seven years at the University of Chicago, and retired after 33 years of teaching and scholarship at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The author or editor of at least eight books, Laslett was part of the generation of scholars who moved labor history from the parochial to the mainstream in the last decades of the 20th century. His deeply researched studies engaged with questions of so-called American exceptionalism, the history of the left, and the impact of migration on class consciousness and trade unionism.<\/p>\n
Laslett strove to operate not only within the halls of academia, but to make his work relevant and accessible to those in the trade union movement. As one Los Angeles union leader said upon hearing of Laslett\u2019s death, \u201cJohn was one of the labor historians who helped document and interpret our working-class history for us activists.\u201d As recently as 2025, Laslett\u2019s writing was included in a local study group focused on how unions and immigrants combined forces to change the politics of Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
Laslett was born in the United Kingdom during the Great Depression and evacuated to the countryside to escape the bombing of WWII. His father was a Baptist minister, and his mother was born into the Alden family of Oxford, whose family lineage included a Mayor of Oxford and a member of Parliament.<\/p>\n
As a child of \u201cdissenters\u201d (i.e. not members of the Church of England), Laslett drew from the long tradition of \u201cnonconformists\u201d who played a significant role in British politics over many centuries, advocating for religious freedom, social justice, and strong moral values. He was the youngest of seven children, five of whom worked in different fields of education, including his oldest brother Peter who was an important scholar of historical demography at the University of Cambridge and a key figure in the development of Britain\u2019s University of the Third Age.<\/p>\n
After a two-years stint in the British army in the 1950s, John Laslett attended Oxford University during the postwar expansion of higher education in the UK, and remained there through the completion of his dissertation. In 1962, he accepted a position at the University of Chicago and moved to the U.S. with his American wife, Barbara Laslett, who would go on to become a prominent feminist sociologist.<\/p>\n
Laslett\u2019s first book, Labor and the Left:<\/em> A Study of Socialist and Radical Influences in the American Labor Movement, 1881-1924<\/em> (1970) reflected the resurgence of scholarly interest in working-class social history that followed the publication of E.P. Thompson\u2019s, The Making of the English Working Class<\/em> (1963). Against the backdrop of the Cold War association of radicalism with the Soviet Union, a new generation of historians sought to excavate the story of homegrown radicalisms. Labor and the Left<\/em>, which focused on the rise and fall of socialist influence in six trade unions, was an institutional history, not yet influenced by the New Labor History\u2019s emphasis on broader currents of working-class life and culture that was beginning to shake up the field. Still, there were expertly crafted chapters on German brewery workers, Jewish garment workers, and Irish shoemakers. Laslett argued that activists in each of these unions embraced socialism in response to Gilded Age excesses of wealth and power, and then abandoned the faith in favor of reformist trade unionism as conditions changed and trade union power grew. One can see in Laslett\u2019s book the interweaving of ethnic and working-class history shared with contemporaries, and would be the focus of his later work.<\/p>\n
During his years in the Midwest, Laslett completed work on Labor and the Left<\/em>. In those years, Chicago itself was a center of new American radicalisms, and Laslett and his young family marched in support of fair housing and civil rights, and against the war in Vietnam.<\/p>\n
Laslett\u2019s first major publication followed a series of influential studies of American radicalism including James Weinstein\u2019s The Decline of Socialism in America<\/em> (1967), David Montgomery\u2019s Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans<\/em> (1967) and Melvyn Dubofsky\u2019s history of the Industrial Workers of the World, We Shall be All <\/em>(1969). Over the next decade or so much more was to come, including important books by James Green, Mari Jo Buhle, and Nick Salvatore.\u00a0 For all their differences, these works took socialism as a positive and deeply rooted force in American life, not one that was\u2014as some conservative scholars argued\u2014intrinsically out of touch with American realities. Much of this work was inspired by the New Left\u2019s search for a \u201cuseable past,\u201d though in Laslett\u2019s case it may have also reflected his upbringing in Britain, where socialism remained a vibrant working-class tradition.<\/p>\n
The year before the publication of Labor and the Left<\/em>, Laslett moved to California to take a position at UCLA. The campus was undergoing its own radical upsurge around opposition to the Vietnam War and demands for Ethnic Studies. Laslett\u2019s next book extended his work on American radicalism with a huge volume that he co-edited with sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism<\/em> (1974). With contributions from a wide range of leading contemporary scholars and activists and an innovative format that included critical commentary, along with author\u2019s responses, the book also included the first English translation of a selection from Werner Sombart\u2019s foundational 1906 text \u201cWhy Is There No Socialism in the United States?,\u201d an essay that has continued to be the starting point for numerous explorations of American exceptionalism. A 1984 revision of the volume, shorter but with important new material on race, gender, and ethnicity, ensured its continued relevance to debates on American labor radicalism.<\/p>\nColliers Across the Sea (University of Illinois Press, 2000)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
A comparative approach to American labor history and a critique of American exceptionalism, both implicit in these two works, were made explicit in Laslett\u2019s masterful study, Colliers across the Sea: A Comparative Study of Class Formation in Scotland and the American Midwest, 1830-1924<\/em> (2000). Laslett offered a systematic study of coal mining communities in Lanarkshire, Scotland, and northern Illinois, which was an important destination for migrants from Lanarkshire. Combining fine-grained historical analysis with an enthusiasm for tackling big questions regarding working-class consciousness, he demonstrated that\u2014contra exceptionalism\u2014the two regions exhibited strikingly similar patterns of class formation, Though reflecting long-held interests, Laslett\u2019s approach in this monograph was also influenced by his experience as visiting professor in 1973-74 at the University of Warwick\u2019s noted Institute for the Study of Social History in the UK, where a team of talented historians led by Royden Harrison were engaging in intensive research on British coal miners and their communities. During his research on Colliers,<\/em> Laslett developed the idea of \u201coverlapping diasporas\u201d as a way to understand the trajectory of U.S. working-class history. Echoing the work of Herbert Gutman and others, Laslett came to see the working-class history of the U.S. as shaped by the legacies of successive waves of migration and the shifting social and political strategies of immigrant workers as they encountered new conditions in America. diverging only with the different political and economic situations that miners encountered after World War I. Enthusiastically greeted by social historians in both Britain and the United States, Colliers across the Sea<\/em> marked a triumphant close to this phase of Laslett\u2019s scholarship.<\/p>\n
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After a two-years stint in the British army in the 1950s, John Laslett attended Oxford University during the postwar expansion of higher education in the UK, and remained there through the completion of his dissertation. In 1962, he accepted a position at the University of Chicago and moved to the U.S. with his American wife, Barbara Laslett, who would go on to become a prominent feminist sociologist.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.lawcha.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/51EPNQxi9UL.jpg\")
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