Remembering Jim Green, Saturday Session: A year ago, LAWCHA lost a stalwart: Jim Green, LAWCHA’s third president. At a panel on Friday afternoon, we remembered him as a teacher, as a scholar, as a public historian, as a leader of the labor history profession, and as, for so many of us, a mentor and friend.

A panel on Friday called “Traveling the World: Workers’ Transnationalism” was a example of another valuable thing about LAWCHA panels: thoughtful comments and discussions. The papers were good and interesting too–I summarize them in the tweets embedded below–but I want to really highlight Dana Frank’s commentary, which pushed the speakers and indeed the audience in a new direction.

Religious history panel, Friday Morning: One of the things I most enjoy about LAWCHA conferences is how ecumenical they are. Labor and working-class history is a broad church. Friday morning I went to a panel entitled Religious Leaders, Grassroots Responses, and Political Change.

On Thursday evening, the 2017 LAWCHA conference opened with a barn-burner of a plenary on mass incarceration and prison labor, featuring Heather Thompson, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, and Chelsea Nation and moderated by Julie Greene.  I live-tweeted it (it turns out that I’m a better tweeter than a blogger), and I’ll embed my tweets below.