Our series of interviews with author of new books in labor and working-class history continues. This month, we speak to Jeremy Zallen, whose book American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750-1865 was published this week by the University of North Carolina Press.
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2019 marks the 150th anniversary of the Knights of Labor, the most important labor movement of the Gilded Age. It is worth thinking anew about that organization and not just because of that anniversary. We are now deep in the second Gilded Age and if we look back to that earlier age of plutocrats, it becomes clear that we are repeating more than a label.
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One hundred years ago, revolutionary potential was exciting the sensibilities of radicals and counter-revolutionists across the country. In February 1919, the passions and potential of a workers movement was nowhere more powerfully demonstrated than in the Seattle General Strike. Anna Louise Strong was one of the prime chroniclers of the strike, and wrote one of the most memorable lines of the moment:
We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by LABOR in this country, a move which will lead
– NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!
Read more →Tula Connell, chair of LAWCHA’s Independent Scholars Committee and Claire Goldstene, chair of the Contingent Faculty Committee organized a Saturday lunch plenary at the June 2019 LAWCHA meeting in Durham. The well-attended and highly participatory session offered an opportunity to make more visible the experiences of independent and contingent faculty scholars, to learn about work the committees have done around issues impacting independent and contingent faculty, and to continue the conversations about what LAWCHA can do and how we can protect all workers in higher education.
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Neoliberal globalization presents many challenges to labor organizing. Increased mobility of capital has led to a sharp increase in relocation, outsourcing, and offshoring.
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Paul Buhle’s review of Dean A. Strang, Keep the Wretches In Order: America’s Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department and the Fall of the IWW. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019.
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Ed: This is one of a series of conference notes from the recent LAWCHA conference. If you have reflections from one of the panels or plenaries, please send them along.
Teaching Labor’s Story: A Mission and a Workshop
The Trump years and rise of white nationalism in the United States and Europe has given new urgency to the work of the Labor and Working-Class History Association and to democracy-loving historians.
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Ed: This is one of a series of conference notes from the recent LAWCHA conference. If you have reflections from one of the panels or plenaries, please send them along.
Recap of #LAWCHA19 session: “The Dramatic Media’s Representations of Workers , Unions, and Labor Conflict in 1950s America”
We were treated to a fascinating panel on historical representations of labor in the media “past and present” in a panel organized by David Witwer.
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Ed: This is one of a series of conference notes from the recent LAWCHA conference. If you have reflections from one of the panels or plenaries, please send them along.
I interviewed a long-time worker at Chicago’s palatial Palmer House hotel for a project I am working on.
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Ed: This is one of a series of conference notes from the recent LAWCHA conference. If you have reflections from one of the panels or plenaries, please send them along.
The LAWCHA conference roundtable, “Social Reproduction as a Category for Labor History,” was a well-attended interactive discussion of the past, present, and future of social reproduction within labor history.
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