The Charles H. Kerr Company, founded in Chicago in 1886 by Charles Hope Kerr, is the oldest labor and socialist publishing house in the United States. It is best known for its editions of radical classics; it was the first publisher to bring out the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital in English, and published the International Socialist Review since its inception in 1900. Other authors whose books or contributions were published by Kerr include such well-known radical and socialist thinkers as Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Jack London, Mary E. Marcy, Joe Hill, Clarence Darrow, Sen Katayama, Antonio Labriola, V.I. Lenin, Friedrich Engels, Leon Trotsky, Carl Sandburg, Ralph Chaplin, and Arturo M. Giovannitti.

Charles H. Kerr began his career in publishing in 1883 as an assistant editor and business manager for Unity, a monthly journal for the Western Unitarian Conference. By 1886, the interests of the Unity venture were transferred to the brand new Charles H. Kerr & Company. The new company expanded in the 1880's and 1890's to include the publication of other Unitarian-related literature, and expanded yet again at the turn of the century to start publishing populist, reform, socialist, communist, and other radical literature. When Charles Kerr retired in 1928 he left the company to be handled by John Keracher, who had been a Kerr Company board member since 1924, had been active in the past in socialist, communist, and Marxist organizations, and who was also one of the founders of the Proletarian Party. Keracher combined offices of the Kerr Company and of the Proletarian Party, and that practice was continued by his successor, Al Wysocki, when he assumed the management around 1953. The company nearly went out of existence in the late 1960's, and due to Wysocki's age and failing health, he transferred the company over to four men in 1971: Fred Thompson, Burton Rosen, Virgil Vogel, and Irving Abrams. Virgil Vogel resigned in 1973, and Joe Giganti replaced him. Burton Rosen, who was secretary and did the bulk of the day-to-day operations and office tasks, retired in 1983 and handed over operations and management to Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, who run the company to this day.