Perlman, Selig (1888–1959)

Abstract

Selig Perlman was born in 1888 at Bialystok, Poland, then a part of Tsarist Russia. His father was a yarn spinner. Perlman grew up in an atmosphere shaped at once by the labour movement, socialism and Zionism. He emigrated to the United States in 1908, and took up studies with John R. Commons at the University of Wisconsin. He received his Ph.D. there in 1915, joined the teaching faculty and became professor of economics in 1927. He collaborated on the four-volume History of Labor in the United States compiled by Commons (1918–35), and published A History of Trade Unionism in the United States (1922). His most important work, the influential A Theory of the Labor Movement, appeared in 1928. Perlman died in 1959.