Roediger was born on July 13, 1952, in Columbia, Illinois. He attended local public schools through high school. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in education from Northern Illinois University in 1975. He went on to do graduate study and earned a PhD in history from Northwestern University in 1980, where he wrote a dissertation under the direction of George M. Fredrickson.
After receiving his doctorate, Roediger was a lecturer and assistant professor of history at Northwestern University from 1980 to 1985. He served as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri in 1985, rising to full professor in 1992. He moved to the University of Minnesota in 1995, and was chair of the university's American Studies Program from 1996 to 2000.
In 2000, he was appointed professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Roediger has also served as the director for the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society at UIUC. Beginning in the fall of 2014, he has been the Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Kansas.[2] Roediger is a member of the board of directors of the Charles H Kerr Company Publishers, a position he has held since 1992.
Research
Roediger's research interests primarily concern race and class in the United States, although he has also written on radicalism in American history and politics.
In 1989, Roediger and historian Philip Foner co-authored Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day, a book that provides a highly detailed account of the movement to shorten the working day in the United States. The work broke new ground by combining labor history with a study of culture and the nature of work. The book also extended the history of the eight-hour day movement to colonial times. The authors argued that debate over the length of the work-day or work-week has been the central issue of the American labor movement during periods of high growth.
The Wages of Whiteness
Theodore W. Allen's "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race" (1975),[3] a pamphlet that later was expanded into his seminal two-volume work The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (1994, 2012) and[4]The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 2: "The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America" (1997, 2012);[5] has also been influential in this field. The argument was also in some regards anticipated by Abram Lincoln Harris' radical scholarship in the 1920s.[a] Allen later wrote of Roediger's work:
"...because of its almost universal acceptance for use in colleges and universities, has served as the single most effective instrument in the socially necessary consciousness-raising function of objectifying 'whiteness,' and in popularizing the 'race-as-a-social-construct' thesis. As one who has been the beneficiary of kind supportive comments from him for my own efforts in this field of historical investigation, I undertake this critical essay with no other purpose than furthering our common aim of the disestablishment of white identity, and the overthrow of white supremacism in general."[7]
Wages of Whiteness won the Merle Curti Award in 1992 from the Organization of American Historians, for the best work of social history in 1991.
Recent work
Roediger is researching the interrelation between labor management and the formation of racial identities in the U.S.
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Rev. ed. London, UK and New York: Verso Books. 1999. ISBN1-85984-240-2.
Co-authored works
with Elizabeth Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and The Management of Labor in U.S. History. Oxford: Oxford University P, 2012. ISBN9780199739752
with Philip S. Foner, Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day. Greenwood, Colo.: Greenwood Press, 1989. ISBN0-313-26062-1
with Tyler Stallings, Amelia Jones, Amelia, and Ken Gonzales-Day, Whiteness: A Wayward Construction. Laguna Beach, Calif.: Laguna Art Museum, 2003. ISBN0-911291-31-8
Works edited
with Martin Blatt, The Meaning of Slavery in the North. New York: Garland, 1998. ISBN0-8153-3758-2
with Ronald C. Kent, Sara Markham, and Herbert Shapiro, Culture, Gender, Race, and U.S. Labor History. Greenwood, Colo.: Greenwood Press, 1993. ISBN0-313-28828-3
Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White. Paperback edn New York: Schocken Books, 1999. ISBN0-8052-1114-4
Fellow Worker: The Life of Fred Thompson, By Fred Thompson. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., 1993. ISBN0-88286-220-0
John Brown, By W.E.B. DuBois. New York: Random House, 2001. ISBN0-679-78353-9
Labor Struggles in the Deep South, By Covington Hall. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1999. ISBN0-88286-244-8
An ill founded fear of seditious combination between outnumbering Negro slaves and landless whites led the dominant whites to foster and augment race distinctions just as many modern employers maintain a definite proportion of representatives of different races and nationalities as a bulwark against labor organization and as others, more ruthless, exploit race antipathy upon the theory of divide et impera[6]
Also from Allen: “the opposition to slavery which emanated from the Northwest and the eastern wage-earners was caused by their recognition of a fundamental antagonism of interest between the slavery system and free labor rather than by their humanitarism. As a matter of fact the northern wage-earners were as hostile to Negro freemen as to the slaves. The mobbing of Negroes was quite a common occurrence in the northern and middlewestern cities during the pre-civil war period." [here, Allen cites LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, Part I, Ch. 20 and Part II, Ch. 5. Also THE NEW YORK RIOTS]" (472).
References
↑Roediger, David. "CV"(PDF). history.ku.edu. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2 April 2016. Retrieved 6 February 2018.
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