Nelson Lichtenstein (born November 15, 1944) is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy. He is best known as a labor historian and for his research into 20th century American political economy, including the automotive industry and Wal-Mart.
Lichtenstein was born to Theodore and Beryle (Nelson) Lichtenstein in Frederick, Maryland in 1944. He married Joanne Landy in 1971; the union dissolved in 1978. He subsequently married fellow labor scholar Eileen Boris in 1979. They have one child, a son, Daniel.
Lichtenstein received his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College in 1966 and his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. He edited the reference work Political Profiles from 1975 to 1976, then held a one-year appointment as a lecturer at Ohio State University, after which he edited Ohio History magazine for two years. In 1979, Lichtenstein had a one-year appointment as a visiting professor at The American University in Washington, D.C..
From 1980 to 1989, Lichtenstein was a professor at The Catholic University of America, during which time he was also a visiting associate professor at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1988. In 1989, Lichtenstein took a position as a professor of history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, from which he moved in 2001 to his present position at UCSB.
Lichtenstein was named a junior fellow by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 1982 and senior NEH fellow in 1993. He received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to undertake research at Wayne State University in 1990. He was elected to membership in the Society of American Historians in 2007 and became MacArthur Foundation Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara in 2010.
Lichtenstein's book State of the Union: A Century of American Labor won the prestigious Philip Taft Labor History Book Award in 2003.
Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. ISBN 1-59213-197-2 Google Books link
State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. New edition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-691-11654-7 Google Books link
Walter Reuther, The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1997. ISBN 0-252-06626-X Google Books link
The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business.New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009. ISBN 0-8050-7966-1
Co-authored works
Who Built America? Vol. 2: 1865 to the Present, with Roy Rosenzweig and Joshua Brown. Boston: Bedford Books, 2007.
Edited works
Industrial Democracy in America, co-edited with Harris Howell John. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Major Problems in the History of American Workers, with Eileen Boris. Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8122-3923-7 Google Books link
Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism. New York: The New Press, 2005. Cloth ISBN 1-59558-035-2; Paperback ISBN 1-59558-021-2