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 2011-12 (September 1, 2011-August 31, 2012). 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, 2012 to:

LAWCHA
c/o Sanford Institute of Public Policy
Duke University
Box 90239
Durham, NC 27708-0239

2012 Prize

Winner: Marjorie Elizabeth Wood for her 2011 University of Chicago dissertation, “Emancipating the Child Laborer: Children, Freedom, and the Moral Boundaries of the Market in the United States, 1853-1938.” Advisor: Thomas Holt.

The Gutman Prize Committee wrote:

In her expansive and imaginatively structured history of child labor reform, Marjorie Elizabeth Wood demonstrates how the effort to ameliorate or abolish underage work has been inexorably linked to evolving conceptions of childhood, child development, the growth of a consumer society, and the organization of work, both in the factory, on the farm, and at home. Wood’s narrative, backed by remarkable research in a highly variegated set of sources and archives, takes her from the world of the antislavery movement to late 19th century conflicts between labor and capital and on to the conservative social politics of 1920s America and the reformism of the early New Deal. In the process, she finds no Whiggish path toward child labor reform. Abolitionist commitment to a free labor ideology might well lead toward a celebration of the moral, redemptive value of work among children, while the early 20th century effort to eliminate child labor in Southern textiles was often predicated upon racist assumptions that strengthened the emerging Jim Crow regime. And in the 1920s and 1930s, reform efforts to legislate an end to underage work faced sustained opposition from a reactionary political coalition, often religious and rural in orientation, whose ideology is not without contemporary resonance. Wood’s dissertation is therefore a multidimensional probe which draws upon scholarship from slavery and emancipation studies, from gender and family history, from the history of consumption and from work on Progressive and New Deal era state building in order to cast a new and revealing light on one of the central issues of labor history. This is therefore a dissertation very much in the tradition pioneered by Herbert Gutman.

2012 Committee: Nelson Lichtenstein UC-Santa Barbara, Chair; Michael Pierce, University of Arkansas; and Heather Thompson, Temple University.

Past Winners

  • 2011 Winner: Jacob Remes, “Cities of Comrades: Urban Disasters and the Formation of the North American Progressive State.” (Duke University, Advisor: Gunther Peck)
  • 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 2012 Philip Taft History Award for the best book in American labor and working-class history published in 2010. The winner is Cindy Hahamovitch, No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor(Princeton University Press). Based on extensive research in archival collections and oral history interviews across national and imperial borders, Cindy Hahamovitch offers an incisive and expansive history of Jamaican "guestworkers" in the United States since World War II. Revealing the intricate dynamics between local and global contexts and between individual aspirations and corporate demands, Hahamovitch's engrossing interpretation stands as a cautionary tale of how state regulation of labor migration produced working conditions detrimental to all workers, especially to guestworkers subjected to a permanent state of deportability.

For information on nominations for the 2013 Prize, please visit the Taft Award website. <www.ilr.cornell.edu/taftaward/>