This work presents a concise socio-historical account of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, an event that continues to spark debate 50 years later. It balances a comprehensive overview of the political and economic events of the revolution with a look at the revolution's social impact, and provides an on-the-ground look at the lives of ordinary people. It also features both U.S. and Cuban perspectives to provide a complete and well-rounded look at the revolution and its repercussions, and encourages students to understand history through the viewpoint of individuals living it

Exploring globalization from a labor history perspective, Aviva Chomsky provides historically grounded analyses of migration, labor-management collaboration, and the mobility of capital. She illuminates the dynamics of these movements through case studies set mostly in New England and Colombia. Taken together, the case studies offer an intricate portrait of two regions, their industries and workers, and the myriad links between them over the long twentieth century, as well as a new way to conceptualize globalization as a long-term process. Chomsky examines labor and management at two early-twentieth-century Massachusetts factories: one that transformed the global textile industry by exporting looms around the world, and another that was the site of a model program of labor-management collaboration in the 1920s. She follows the path of the textile industry from New England, first to the U.S. South, and then to Puerto Rico, Japan, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and Colombia. She considers how towns in Rhode Island and Massachusetts began to import Colombian workers as they struggled to keep their remaining textile factories going. Most of the workers eventually landed in service jobs: cleaning houses, caring for elders, washing dishes. Focusing on Colombia between the 1960s and the present, Chomsky looks at the Urabá banana export region, where violence against organized labor has been particularly acute, and, through a discussion of the AFL-CIO’s activities in Colombia, she explores the thorny question of U.S. union involvement in foreign policy. In the 1980s, two U.S. coal mining companies began to shift their operations to Colombia, where they opened two of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world. Chomsky assesses how different groups, especially labor unions in both countries, were affected. Linked Labor Histories suggests that economic integration among regions often exacerbates regional inequalities rather than ameliorating them.

In the late nineteenth century, several U.S.-based companies, which merged into the United Fruit Company in 1899, began to build railroads and cultivate bananas in Costa Rica's Atlantic Coast province of Limon, recruiting mainly Jamaican workers. The society that developed in Limon was an English-speaking enclave of white North American managers and black West Indian workers, with a culture and history distinct from that of the rest of Costa Rica. This detailed and informative study of the banana industry on Costa Rica's Atlantic Coast, focusing on the lives of the industry's workers, explains why the United Fruit Company was never able to maintain the kind of social and economic control it sought over its workers and how the workers managed to create a vibrant alternative social and economic system around the plantation. West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940 is among the first studies of the social history of multinational corporations and makes a significant contribution to current scholarship on plantation societies and labor systems, the history of medicine, the social and labor history of Central America, and Afro-Caribbean history.