“Proclaimed ‘America’s Premier Cultural Resort,’ the Massachusetts Berkshires are also one of America’s premier regions of industrialization – and of deindustrialization. The Gritty Berkshires… tells for the first time the story of the North Berkshire region’s working people from Shays’ Rebellion to the struggles with post-industrial poverty. It is great scholarship – and a great read. This is ‘people’s history’ at its best.”
– Jeremy Brecher, author of Strike!
“Every visitor to MASS MoCA should read this book to understand what came before and surrounds the absorbing art. Through painstaking research and empathy, Seider has recovered and brought to life the working-class history of the North Berkshires… This will become a classic for scholars and the general public alike.”
– James W. Russell, author of Class and Race Formation
in North America
“In this history of North Berkshire I can also see the history of Kenosha, Janesville and former paper mill towns of central Wisconsin. The author writes a lively and inviting history in which he melds economic and social analysis, instructive thumbnail biographies of local worker activists – and a scathing critique of our economic system and the shortsighted elites who control its rewards and shape its myths.”
– David Newby, President Emeritus, Wisconsin State AFL-CIO
“Reminiscent of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and the Lynds’ Middletown series, The Gritty Berkshires describes how the working class of the northern Berkshires has fought, throughout its history, against dehumanizing conditions of work and for decent pay and benefits. The book is both unorthodox and unrivaled in its treatment of this area and its people.”
– David Fairris, Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor,
University of California, Riverside
“You don’t need a connection with Western Massachusetts to love The Gritty Berkshires. Seider tells a local story that’s a microcosm of national labor history… He brings many heroic and villainous characters to life, and he brings to this meticulously researched narrative a spirit of working-class solidarity that our country sorely needs.”
– Betsy Leondar-Wright, Board member, Class Action (www.classism.org) and author of Missing Class: Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures
“Congratulations, it’s a winner for sure.”
— Matt Tannenbaum, owner,
The Bookstore & Get Lit Wine Bar, Lenox, MA
Above: Men working inside Hoosac Tunnel (no date, North Adams Public Library). Below: Women working at Sprague Electric Company, 1945 (reproduced from Sprague "Log" by Paul W. Marino).
Recipient of the 2020 Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Award’s Gold Medal for Best Regional Non-fiction Book, U.S. Northeast Region.
As The Gritty Berkshires makes clear, Massachusetts’ westernmost county is not just art museums, music festivals and beautiful scenery. For generations of working class families who have lived in the northern part of this county, their reality looks more like Rust Belt America.
Maynard Seider, an activist sociologist who has taught and researched in the area for more than three decades, places the history of the North Berkshire region in the context of U.S. and global history. Through the use of oral histories, union archives, newspaper accounts and participant observation, the author focuses on the 1,000 men who built the nation’s longest railroad tunnel, the thousands of men and women who worked in its textile mills and electronics factories and who struck, built worker co-ops, and community coalitions to improve their daily lives.
In this history, we learn how the Berkshires offer insight into so many crucial aspects of the American experience. Moving from the early 1800s to the present, Seider weaves a narrative that details the area’s vibrant immigrant history, slavery’s role in its textile industry, the battle for national unions and the ideological struggles with corporate elites over who best speaks for the community. Enriched by dozens of photographs, these stories focus on the voices of ordinary people as they often do extraordinary things.
Seider concludes his book by considering the question of “What’s next?” through a case study of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). These brick buildings which housed generations of blue and white collar workers until 1986 now attract tourists to the country’s largest contemporary art collection. Yet the unanswered question remains, can a tourist-service economy provide a meaningful and economically sustainable life for its residents?
The Gritty Berkshires’ last section deals with this question both nationally and locally, exploring diverse responses amidst the nation’s growing inequality, militarism and cutbacks in social services.
Click the link to read “Maynard Seider: Slavery and the North Berkshires,” a column published by The Berkshire Eagle.
Click the link to read “Maynard Seider: Struggle and resistance in North Berkshire,” a column published by The Berkshire Eagle.
Click the link to read “Open book with Maynard Seider” an interview with the author published by The Berkshire Eagle.
Click to watch Maynard Seider's interview at WAMC with Joe Donahue.
Click the link to read an article about The Gritty Berkshires by Berkshire Trade & Commerce.
Click the link to read “Northern Berkshires’ Blue-collar Lament" by Hill Country Observer
Click the link to read “Maynard Seider: North Adams is at a Crossroads" by The Berkshire Eagle.
Click the link to read “Maynard Seider: Howard Fast, North Adams and 'Clarkton'" by The Berkshire Eagle.
Click the link to read “Maynard Seider: North Adams is a Union Town" by The Berkshire Edge.
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Also available online at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, and Indiebound. You may also contact Maynard Seider directly.
An interview with Maynard Seider on April 24 by James Lescault, director of Amherst Media, the community cable station in Amherst, Massachusetts.