Queer Career opens with a reflection on work's contradictions. While jobs impose discipline and mandate conformity, workers also hope to find fulfillment and express their individuality while on the clock. Labor force segmentation mirrors social disparities, but workplaces are also sites where diverse people converge and collaborate. The tensions in this abstracted meditation—between exploitation and authenticity, between domination and subjectivity—ground the book's historical analysis and shape the tools Margot Canaday brings to the job. There is much to say about Queer Career's interventions as a history of gender, sexuality, law, and social movements. Still, its most revelatory innovations are as a model of what Canaday terms “an affective labor history” (19).

Understanding the history of consumer debt in the twentieth century seems simple enough: market making. Debt has existed as long as civilization, but it was only in the last century that our petty debts became big business, and that was made possible by making markets for consumer debts akin to those of businesses and governments.

It is hard to review African American history without confronting the multiple meanings of debt. There was debt owed, debt paid, debt inherited, and debt hidden in the social tax associated with a subordinate status in the United States. All of these meanings are embedded in the murder of Elmore Bolling. Called Buddy by his relatives, Bolling defied probability by building a highly successful business in Lowndesboro, Alabama, in the 1930s and 1940s. He used debt in a conventional sense, to lease a plantation. Yet his entrepreneurial skills allowed him to offset that debt and amass wealth. He grew corn, cotton, and sugar cane. More impressively, he owned a general store, a gas station, a fleet of trucks, and a catering business, which enabled him to employ at least forty other Black residents. His business acumen allowed him to maintain $40,000 in the bank and another $5,000 in other assets, a remarkable sum for a Black man in the American South during the Jim Crow era.

It is truly a pleasure and an honor to have my work read by five such esteemed colleagues, and I want to begin by thanking all of them for the thoughtfulness and care of their essays, and also to express my gratitude to Darren Dochuk for organizing this exchange. After working in (pandemic-exacerbated) isolation for so long, it is fascinating for me to see the book through others’ eyes, to appreciate what has resonated, and to grapple with questions and qualms as well.

In 1974, women at the New York Times made national headlines when they filed a class-action sex discrimination lawsuit. The drama of the court case, however, has overshadowed the formation of the Times Women's Caucus two years prior, in 1972. A focus on the Caucus, the daily labor its members undertook in the years before and after filing suit, and the behind-the-scenes negotiation of internal office politics reveals the years-long process of consciousness raising and workplace organizing required to undertake a lawsuit in this novel legal area. Activist newswomen operated with unique restrictions and necessarily distanced themselves from the feminist movement, while quietly advocating for feminist goals. Caucus members drew from the feminist, labor, and union movements strategically rather than ideologically, and laid the foundation for substantial shifts in women's participation and representation in the mainstream media.

Oil is the elephant in every room in modern American history. From the consumer-culture room to the politics room, the labor room to the U.S.-and-the-world room, oil is right there, as big as Texas, yet hardly anyone notices. That is less true than it used to be. The Journal of American History even devoted a special issue to oil in 2012. Yet modern American historians still have not thought enough about “crude reality.”