American Work travels through 350 years of history to tell the epic, often tragic story of success and failure on the uneven playing fields of American labor.

Here is the story of how virtually every significant social transformation in American history (from bound to free labor, from farm work to factory work, from a blue-collar to a white-collar economy) rolled back the hard-won advances of African Americans who had managed to gain footholds in various jobs and industries.

It is not a story of simple ideological "racism," but of politics and economics interacting to determine - and determine differently in different times and places - what kind of work was "suitable" to which groups. Jacqueline Jones shows how racially divided workplaces developed, and how efforts to gain or preserve group advantages in certain jobs helped to foster racial hatred and contradictory stereotypes.

Ultimately, she reveals in an unmistakable light how systematic forms of discrimination have denied whole groups of Americans the opportunity to compete for jobs, training, and promotions on an equal footing.