Graduate Student Travel Grants to 2012 OAH-LAWCHA Conference
LAWCHA
will provide four $250 Travel Grants to graduate students whose
papers have been accepted for LAWCHA panels at the Organization of
American Historians conference in Milwaukee, April 19-22, 2012.
Requests for funding should be forwarded to Executive Assistant
Ryan Poe rmp23@duke.edu.
Current membership in LAWCHA is required at the time of the request.
Requests should include confirmation of the paper's acceptance, a
short description of the paper, and a C.V. The deadline for
requests is January 15, 2012
February 29, 2012.
Requirements checklist:
- LAWCHA-Sponsored Panel
- Must be a LAWCHA Memeber
- Confirmation of Paper's Acceptance
- Short Description of the Paper
- Applicant's C.V.
- E-mail all materials to Ryan Poe, rmp23@duke.edu
Herbert G. Gutman Prize for Outstanding Dissertation
The Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) is pleased to announce its fifth annual Dissertation Prize. This prize has been established with the cooperation with the University of Illinois Press. LAWCHA, founded in 1998, encourages the study of working-class men and women, their lives, workplaces, communities, organizations, cultures, political activities, and societal contexts. It aims to promote an international, theoretically informed, comparative, interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and diverse labor and working-class history. Its journal is the prize-winning LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas.
The prize is named in honor of the late Herbert G. Gutman, who was a pioneering labor historian in the U.S. and a founder of the University of Illinois Press’s “Working Class in American History” Series. LAWCHA hopes that the spirit of Gutman’s inquiry into the many facets of labor and working-class history will live on in this prize. The winner will receive a cash prize of $500 from LAWCHA and a publishing contract with the University of Illinois Press. The prize is contingent upon the author’s acceptance of the contract with the University of Illinois Press.
Eligible dissertations must be in English, concerned with U.S. labor and working-class history broadly conceived, and must have been defended in the academic year 2010-11 (September 1, 2010-August 31, 2011). Applicants must be current members of LAWCHA at the time of the submission. The winner will be announced by March 15, 2012.
Send (4) four hard copies of the dissertation, along with a letter of endorsement from the dissertation advisor stating the date of the defense by November 30, 2011 to:
LAWCHA
c/o
Sanford Institute of Public Policy
Duke University
Box
90239
Durham, NC 27708-0239
2011 Prize
Winner: Jacob Remes for his 2010 Duke University dissertation, “Cities of Comrades: Urban Disasters and the Formation of the North American Progressive State.” Advisor: Gunther Peck.The Gutman Prize Committee wrote:
Deploying insights derived from the anthropological and sociological work of James Scott and Kai Erickson, Remes skillfully probes the social, political, and imaginative aftermath of a 1914 fire in Salem, Massachusetts that displaced the city’s French-Canadian work force, and a calamitous munitions explosion in Halifax three years later, which also damaged working class districts. Remes shows that middle-class Progressives and working-class residents understood the disasters in very different terms. The Progressive rescue workers saw social and physical chaos all about them, while much self-activity and organization within the working-class generated a very different self-perception from below.
A fine writer and a prodigious archival researcher, Remes offers historians a new way to foreground neglected but vital themes in the working-class history of these disasters which prove useful in our own Katrina-era day. He shows how contests between working and middle-class residents decisively shaped the terms of moral and religious “rescue” that emerged in the wake of these urban disasters; he offers a new understanding of how the post-disaster diaspora shaped the meaning of public memory and citizenship; and Remes demonstrates how informal ties among families and friends proved surprisingly important in shaping Progressive Era state formation and expansion. In short, Jacob Remes opens a new door to an understanding both of Progressive statecraft and to the working-class experience that proved so influential during that era of heightened governmental activity and ambition.
2011 Committee: Nelson Lichtenstein UC-Santa Barbara, Chair; Michael Pierce, University of Arkansas; and Heather Thompson, Temple University.
Past Winners
- 2010 Winner: Jessie B. Ramey, “A Childcare Crisis: Poor Black and White Families and Orphanages in Pittsburgh, 1878-1929” (Carnegie-Mellon University, Advisor: Tera W. Hunter)
- 2009 Winner: Michael Rosenow, “Injuries to All: The Rituals of Dying and the Politics of Death among United States Workers, 1877-1910” (University of Illinois, Advisor: James R. Barrett)
- 2008 Winner: Jarod Roll, “Road to the Promised Land: Rural Rebellion in the New Cotton South, 1890-1945” (Northwestern University, Advisor: Nancy Maclean)
Philip Taft Labor History Book Award
The Cornell University ILR School, in collaboration with LAWCHA, is pleased to announce the winner of the 2011 Philip Taft History Award for the best book in American labor and working-class history published in 2010. The winner is James D. Schmidt, Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor (Cambridge University Press). Through an elegant and lively narrative based on court cases involving injured young workers of the Appalachian South, James D. Schmidt explains how "child labor" as a concept came to be normalized in American culture and proscribed in American law at the turn of the twentieth century. His captivating interpretation compels us to reconsider the historical origins of modern social views and values surrounding work, childhood, and industrial capitalism.
For information on nominations for the 2012 Prize, due by December 15, 2011, please visit the Taft Award website. <www.ilr.cornell.edu/taftaward/>