The Contagion and a Cure
Mark Lause looks at the 1793 yellow fever pandemic in Philadelphia from a working class history perspective, and finds it informs us today.
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Labor & Working Class Cultural Picks to Click
One of my favorite quotes from Mother Jones is “Sit Down and Read. Educate Yourself for the Coming Conflicts.” While she had a reputation as an agitator, much of her organizing stamina came from the soul-nourishing books she returned to again and again.
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Remapping the American Left: A History of Radical Discontinuity
Duke University Press is allowing us to offer free access for three months to James Gregory’s provocative new essay “Remapping the American Left: A History Of Radical Discontinuity.”
The essay is based on his Labor and Working Class History Association Presidential Address and derives from his Mapping American Social Movements Project, which has mapped the major social movements of the twentieth century including a great variety of campaigns, political projects, and media outlets.
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Covid-19, the Halifax Explosion, and Crises of Care
One of the first principles of critical disaster studies is that disasters exist not as time-out-of-time, but as embedded in the times and places that produce them. Because disasters are part of history, not outside of it, they can bring into relief structures of society that were always there.
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Labor and COVID-19: An International Perspective
How can we examine COVID-19 crisis from a global labor perspective? Several hundred people tuned in on April 9, 2020, for a discussion on this topic. It’s a perspective you won’t hear on the mainstream media! This program was sponsored by the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University.
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NYC’s LGBTQIA Community Has Organized, Against Death, Again
An injury to one is an injury to all. A service to one is a service to all. During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, New York City’s LGBTQIA community has banded together to form an online mutual aid community called “The End Is Queer.”
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John Prine’s “Grandpa Was a Carpenter”
The great John Prine, a victim of the coronavirus last week, spent a career penning and performing songs about his own death, many of them winningly whimsical, from 1973’s “Please Don’t Bury Me” to 2018’s “When I Get to Heaven.” Prine’s vision of death was irreverent, and over a half-century of songwriting he optimistically anticipated an afterlife filled with wonderful encounters and experiences straight out of … well, the best John Prine songs.
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Class, Capitalism, and Coronovirus at Disney’s Newest Attraction
Last week the Coronavirus forced Disney to announce that its American parks are now closed indefinitely, resulting in the longest interruptions of any kind since they opened in 1955 (Disneyland) and 1965 (Walt Disney World). Disney has been on my mind because I made my first ever visit to Walt Disney World in Orlando on January 25th of this year, just as the first COVID 19 cases were being identified in the US.
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Class and the Challenge of COVID-19
COVID-19, the coronavirus that is spreading across the world, is wreaking havoc on working people and their families. Weeks after it burst onto the world scene, the end of this deadly threat is still not in sight. Although it is clear that its death toll will not begin to approximate that of the lethal 1918-19 worldwide Spanish Influenza epidemic, early indications are that COVID-19 could end up inflicting even more economic and political damage than that earlier pandemic.
Read more →Boris Roundtable: The Author Responds
A real pleasure of academic exchange is to engage with readers who “get” one’s book. In their distinct ways, Chaumtoli Huq, Sarah Lyons, Katherine Turk, and Naomi Williams underscore the interpretative thrust behind the narrative arc of Making the Woman Worker, which uses the International Labour Organization (ILO) as its archive.
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