Introduction : labor transformation and networks of resistance -- Labor, race, and Homer Plessy's freedom claim -- Transformation and resistance : a war of images in the post-Plessy south -- "I got so mad, I just had to get something off my chest" : the contested terrain of women's organizations...

A note on language -- Introduction -- Liberating free labor : vere foster and assisted Irish emigration to the United States, 1850-1865 -- Humanitarianism's markets : brokering the domestic labor of black refugees, 1861-1872 -- Chinese servants and the American colonial imagination : domesticity...