The Fruits of Their Labor

“An important contribution to our understanding of agricultural labor relations and, more generally, is important in its observations about the weighted actions of allegedly neutral government programs.” — Labor Studies Journal

“Brings together excellent historiography of the understudied East Coast migrant stream. . . . This excellent historical analysis is particularly timely.” — Industrial and Labor Relations Review

“Finely crafted . . . Details how changing agricultural markets and production practices combined with labour distribution efforts of private, government, and union agencies to create a permanent migratory labour force deprived of power and mired in poverty.” — Labour

“[Hahamovitch] accomplishes a rare synthesis that skillfully weaves together the strands of agricultural history, immigration history, labor history, southern history, and history of the state. . . . Historians of all these specialties will be pushed into the interrelated corners of their fields and should be inspired to ask some creative new questions.” — Agricultural History

“[This book] fills an important gap. . . . [Hahamovitch] has thoroughly mined manuscript and oral history collections, contemporary newspapers, and government archives to develop a readable, chronological narrative. . . . [This book] breaks important ground in understanding rural class relations and the role of the federal government in shaping the face of modern agriculture.” — Journal of Southern History

“[Hahamovitch] tells a powerful story of how the actions of the state affect people’s day-to-day lives. In doing so, she puts the state back into history and produces a book that is a crucial work for anyone interested in American political history and the development of the twentieth-century nation-state.” — Florida Historical Quarterly

”[A] well-crafted, deeply-researched, clearly-written, comprehensive narrative-analytical history.” — Journal of Southwest Georgia History

“[This book] charts a course toward a new and robust synthesis of rural, labor, and policy history.” — Journal of Interdisciplinary History

“Cindy Hahamovitch has put together a masterful history of the relationship between Atlantic Coast farmworkers, the growers for whom they labored, and the state. This study is valuable not only for its synthesis of extensive primary source material, but also for its lessons regarding the relationship between capital and the state.” — Labor History

“Hahamovitch’s engaging prose and tight conceptualization carry us across virtually uncharted terrain. The Fruits of Their Labor perceptively maps that territory, penetrating the nexus connecting reformers, the state, the technology and economics of truck farming, and the lives of migrant workers on the East Coast.” — James Grossman, The Newberry Library