Nelson Lichtenstein

Nelson Lichtenstein is Research Professor in the Department of History at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author or editor of 18 books, including a biography of the labor leader Walter Reuther and State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2002, 2013 revised). His more recent books are A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism (2023); Capitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies (2020); Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession (2019); Achieving Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy (2016); The Port Huron Statement: Sources and Legacies of the New Left’s Founding Manifesto (2015);The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (2009, 2010); The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination (2013); A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics and Labor (2013); and American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (2006). He has served on the editorial board of numerous journals as well as the University of Illinois Press series in working-class history. His reviews and opinion pieces have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Dissent, New Labor Forum, American Prospect, Jacobin and academic journals. Lichtenstein has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, the University of California, and from the Fulbright Commission and the Oregon Center for the Humanities. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Thereafter he worked in publishing in New York and taught at The Catholic University of America and at the University of Virginia before joining the UCSB faculty in 2001.