This post was originally published in 2013.
Today, Christmas Eve, 2013, marks the 100-year anniversary of the Italian Hall Tragedy in Calumet, Michigan, one of the most tragic events in American labor history.
Read more →posts from the year2020
Jonathan Daniel Wells on his new book, The Kidnapping Club
Jonathan Daniel Wells’ The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War exposes the role of Wall Street, powerful judges, politicians, lawyers and police officers in kidnapping African-Americans and sending them South to enslavement, showing the way that New York’s powerful kept slavery and the slave trade alive.
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Civil Rights Unionism and Democracy for Teachers: Nat LaCour’s Legacy
Nat LaCour connected civil rights unionism to teachers’ struggle to build union democracy. A remembrance and evaluation.
The United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) defy assumptions about anti-union right-to-work Louisiana. As a small, mostly segregated Black local, in 1966, they held the first teachers strike in the South.
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“They’re Not Alone”: An Oral History of the Pennsylvania Faculty Strike of 2016 with an update
We are glad to take this article from behind a paywall link at the Labor: Studies in Working Class History, and are grateful that Duke University Press will make it free for the next two months. And we are grateful that the authors, Gordon Mantler and Rachel Riedner, have provided an update for us.
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Wishbone of The Good Lord Bird: Historical Fiction and Poetic Truth
Showtime’s The Good Lord Bird uses the events around John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry to weave a fictional tale incorporating some basic insights and arguments about the nature of race in America. It did its most impressive work in presenting the wide spectrum of diverse African American responses to slavery and, in the process, offering a better sense of their humanity.
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Middle Class Nightmares: The presidential elections and the “middle class”
This is an English translation of a review first published https://commonware.org/recensioni/vite-di-commessi-elettori-le-elezioni-americane-e-la-middle-class )
Sarah Jones reviews The Sinking Middle Class by David Roediger
“Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it was broken,” says Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman.
Read more →Call For Papers: Invisible Labor in Carceral Spaces: A Special Issue of International Labor and Working-Class History
CALL FOR PAPERS
ILWCH is soliciting articles for a special issue that will examine the history of unfree labor in carceral spaces within a global context. We are seeking essays that explore invisible labor in settings where people have been historically confined and forced or coerced to work.
Invisible Labor in Carceral Spaces: A Special Issue of International Labor and Working-Class History
ILWCH is soliciting articles for a special issue that will examine the history of unfree labor in carceral spaces within a global context. We are seeking essays that explore invisible labor in settings where people have been historically confined and forced or coerced to work.
Read more →Herbert G. Gutman Prize for an Outstanding Dissertation: Deadline December 2
The Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) is pleased to announce its annual Herbert G. Gutman Prize for Outstanding Dissertation in U.S. Labor and Working-Class History, established in cooperation with the University of Illinois Press. LAWCHA encourages the study of working people, their lives, workplaces, communities, organizations, cultures, activism, and societal contexts.
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Aaron Goings on his new book: The Port of Missing Men
In his fascinating new book, Aaron Goings interrogates the legend of Billy Gohl (1873-1927), a union official accused of dozens of murders. He seeks to bring light to the accusations that have made Gohl a true-crime figure in local popular culture.
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