Bruce Nelson (historian)

Bruce Nelson is a professor emeritus of history at Dartmouth College. He is a noted labor historian and scholar of the history of the concepts of race and class in the United States and among Western European immigrants to the U.S.
Background.
Joseph Bruce Nelson was born in the state of New York and raised on Long Island. He graduated from The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut and from Princeton University in 1962 with a degree in religion.
After graduation, Nelson moved to California, where he received his master's degree in history from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1982, he received a PhD in History from Berkeley.
Career.
Labor.
Nelson left academia for nine years to work as an auto worker, machine operator, warehouseman, and longshoreman.
Activism.
Nelson participated in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. In 1965, he went to jail in Selma, Alabama, just prior to the Selma to Montgomery marches.
Academia.
Nelson taught at Dartmouth from 1985 to 2009, where he became a full professor. 
Since becoming emeritus, he has continued to lecture to Dartmouth students, alumni, and interns. Students continue to cite him as influential.
Nelson is a member of the United Association for Labor Education and the Organization of American Historians, and the editorial board of "Labor History".
Research.
Nelson's research focuses on the formation of the concepts of class, race and nationhood in the United States and Western Europe. Most of his published research has examined these issues in the context of the American labor movement, particularly dock and steel workers' unions. In the last five years, Nelson's work has examined themes of race and class in the Irish American experience. His published works are written from the "new labor history" perspective.
Nelson's 1988 book, "Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen and Unionism in the 1930s", was widely praised as a breakthrough in the labor history of the influential West Coast dock workers' unions. The work, based on Nelson's doctoral dissertation, was praised as the "best analysis" of the 1934 West Coast Longshore Strike. It was cited as "an excellent example of the kind of research that is both needed and possible..." and for documenting "clearly and carefully the use of anti-communism as a subterfuge for anti-unionism." The book received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians (awarded to an author publishing his or her first book).
Nelson's second major work, "Divided We Stand", expanded Nelson's interest in the formation of various concepts of "working class." The book focused again on longshoremen but expanded its scope to include workers in New York City, New Orleans and Los Angeles as well as steelworkers in the Midwest. The book was called "a landmark study of race and trade unionism": In more recent years, Nelson has turned his attention away from labor unions and toward Irish Americans as a means of examining shifting concepts of race and class.
Awards and recognition.
Awards:
Nelson received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2002), Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, as well as the Dartmouth Class of 1962 Faculty Fellowship for excellence in scholarship and teaching.
Works.
Aside from collaborative works, Nelson has written the following himself:
Books:
Book chapters:
Articles: