Expected Publication Date: May 27, 2026. Find at Princeton University Press, local booksellers (US / UK), Amazon, or wherever books are sold. Also, ask for it at your local library—sales to libraries are great for authors, too!
The Hobo: A History of America’s First Climate Migrants is a book exploring the colorful history of hoboes—migrant workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States. It is the story of a group of outcasts—homeless men and women who were oftentimes radicals, criminals, Americans and immigrants, poets and writers, and always, migrant workers. It tells the history of their journeys across the North American continent, the kinds of work they might do, and how environmental factors—in particular, a harsh climate and steam technology—shaped that work. It shows how hobos and workers like them underpinned both the Industrial Revolution and the settlement of the American West.
Along the way, the book introduces readers to a variety of hobo authors both famous and not, the difficult, dangerous, and highly unstable jobs they worked, a uniquely hobo blend of socialist, anarchist, and anti-work philosophy, techniques for stowing away on railroads, and many more pieces of hobo life.
This book explores the lives of these workers through a unique approach, one which blends new digital methods, oral history, environmental data, corporate records, and other sources. In showing how hobo work was an adaptation to climate disasters and energy transitions, it shows how environmental catastrophe can have catastrophic consequences for ordinary workers—with terrifying implications for our own time.
Robert Suits 