Working on the Dock of the Bay

In recent decades students of American history have come to learn much about sailors and seamen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in large part because of the complementary interests of labor historians, African American historians, naval historians, and historians of the Atlantic world. Similar attention has yet to be paid to allied occupational groups such as draymen, porters, dockmen, and stevedores, who helped ensure that vessels were properly laded and unladed and that ports fulfilled their primary function—commerce. In Working on the Dock of the Bay Michael D. Thompson offers a well-researched case study of dock life and dock workers in Charleston, South Carolina, between the American Revolution and the Civil War. He fills a gap in the already-crowded historiography of early Charleston, provides fresh insights into class and race relations in the city, and contributes much-needed context for the better-documented labor history of southern dock workers in later periods

Archaeology · Bay · Context (archaeology · DOCK · Economic history · Historiography · Labor history · Labor relations · Political science · Port (circuit theory · South carolina · Spanish Civil War · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Engineering · History · Law · Public Administration