Seth Rockman's latest book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2024) has been named winner of the 2025 Philip Taft Labor History Prize.
The committee defines “labor history” in a broad sense to include the history of workers (free and unfree, organized and unorganized), their institutions, and their workplaces, as well as the broader historical trends that have shaped working-class life, including but not limited to: immigration, slavery, community, the state, race, gender, and ethnicity.