Table of Contents:
  • Introduction
  • "A little avenue to self-mastery": the social world of working-class readers
  • "All sorts of wild, impassioned talk": open forums and the working-class public sphere
  • "To see and hear things that have always been there": labor's pedagogy of the organized
  • Brain workers in the house of labor: life stories and the politics of experience
  • Icons of ignorance and enlightenment: the visual culture of critical consciousness
  • Conclusion: self-education in the shadow of the Cold War.