Rate My Professor Nelson Lichtenstein

Nelson Lichtenstein is Research Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directed the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy for almost 20 years. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1966 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. After completing his doctorate, he worked in publishing in New York and taught at The Catholic University of America and the University of Virginia before joining the UCSB faculty in 2001. As a leading scholar in History, his research centers on labor history, American capitalism, working-class movements, and political economy.

Lichtenstein is the author or editor of 20 books, including Walter Reuther: The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit, a biography of the labor leader; State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2002, revised 2013); 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). His forthcoming works include Why Labor Unions Matter (2026) and Labor’s Partisans: Essential Writings on the Union Movement from the 1950s to Today (2025). He has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals and the University of Illinois Press series in working-class history. Lichtenstein has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, University of California, Fulbright Commission, and Oregon Center for the Humanities. He was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2008 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023. In 2012, the Sidney Hillman Foundation awarded him the Sol Stetin Award for lifetime achievement in labor history, and in 2019 he received UCSB's Faculty Research Lecturer Award, the highest honor from the campus Academic Senate. His opinion pieces and reviews appear in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Dissent, New Labor Forum, American Prospect, and Jacobin.