Joseph Bruce Nelson (1940-2022) was a professor emeritus of history at Dartmouth College and noted labor historian and scholar of the history of the concepts of race and class in the United States and among Western European immigrants to the U.S.[1][2][3] Joseph Bruce Nelson was born on August 9, 1940, in Flushing, Queens, New York City, and raised in Manahasset Bay, Long Island.

The book focused again on longshoremen but expanded its scope to include workers in New York City, New Orleans and Los Angeles as well as steelworkers in the Midwest.

The book was called "a landmark study of race and trade unionism": Bruce Nelson, in line with David Roediger and others, argues that "the history of the white working class, in its majority, was one of self-definition in opposition to an often demonized racial Other [sic] and intense resistance to the quest of African Americans for full citizenship".

What makes Divided We Stand unique is that, unlike heavily cultural whiteness studies that have used scant literary evidence to support sweeping theoretical claims, Nelson digs deeply into archival sources and oral interviews to describe real workers and their shop-floor experience in compelling detail.

[11] In more recent years, Nelson turned his attention away from labor unions and toward Irish Americans as a means of examining shifting concepts of race and class.