Labor, Liberty, and Conflict in US History

Harvard Extension School

HIST E-21

Section 1

CRN 27088

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This course surveys the labor history of the United States from the colonial period to the present. It covers the transition to capitalism, class formation and class conflict, slavery and capitalism, and industrialization and deindustrialization, as well as the relationship between unwaged labor and the development of markets. We examine the lives of workers—men and women, slave and free, union and non-union, and agricultural, industrial, and service sector—and how they were shaped by, and how they shaped, economic history. As such, while primarily a course in the social history, we engage with the political, economic, and cultural history of US as it pertains to the workplace and the history of class conflict.

Credits: 4

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Term

Spring Term 2026

Part of Term

Full Term

Format

Online

Credit Status

Graduate, Undergraduate

Section Status

Open

Instructor Info

Joel Suarez, PhD

Assistant Professor of History and of Social Studies, Harvard University


Meeting Info

1/25 to 5/15

Participation Option: Online Asynchronous

In online asynchronous courses, you are not required to attend class at a particular time. Instead you can complete the course work on your own schedule each week.

Deadlines

Last day to register:

Notes

The recorded lectures are from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences companion course History 21. Registered students can ordinarily live stream the lectures Mondays and Wednesdays, 3-4:15 pm starting January 26 or they can watch them on demand. The recorded sessions are typically available within a few hours of the end of class and no later than the following business day. Class sessions for this course may include students enrolled in the FAS companion course. Accordingly, when you participate in live class sessions, you will do so alongside both Division of Continuing Education (DCE) and FAS students. If you participate in a way that causes you to appear in recordings of the class, those recordings may be shown to DCE students enrolled in this course or FAS students enrolled in the companion course, according to the policies of the two schools on accessing recordings of class sessions.

Syllabus

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Tuition

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All Sections of this Course

CRN Section # Participation Option(s) Instructor Section Status Meets Term Dates
27088 1 Online Asynchronous Joel Suarez Open Jan 25 to May 15

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