David Roediger teaches history and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. He was born in southern Illinois and educated in public schools in that state, with a BS in Education from Northern Illinois University. He completed a doctorate in History at Northwestern in 1979. Roediger has taught labor and Southern history at Northwestern, University of Missouri, University of Minnesota, and University of Illinois. He has also worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. He has written on US movements for a shorter working day, on labor and poetry, on the history of radicalism, and on the racial identities of white workers and of immigrants. His books include Our Own Time , The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived U.S. History, and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, all from Verso, Colored White (California), and Working Towards Whiteness (Basic). His edited books include an edition of Covington Hall's Labor Struggles in the Deep South (Kerr), and another of E. B. Du Bois’s John Brown (Random House/Modern Library) as well as Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (Schocken). The former chair of the editorial committee of the Charles H. Kerr Company, the world’s oldest radical publisher, he has been active in the surrealist movement, labor support, and anti-racist organizing.