- Member News and Awards
- LAWCHA members are winning major awards. Check back soon for updates on LAWCHA Members' recent awards and honors. We want to know if you have been honored recently for your work or scholarship. Please send news of this kind to lawcha@duke.edu.
- Labor Landmarks News
- Check back soon for updates from the Labor Landmarks History and Memory Project committee. If you would like to participate in this committee, or have news to report, please email Committee Chair Jim Green at james.green@umb.edu.
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Call for Participation on New LAWCHA Committee on Labor Landmarks, Public History & Memory
LAWCHA is initiating a new committee to explore labor landmarks, public history and memory. To learn more about this new endeavor, read the article by Jim Green (former president and chair of the new committee) on page 9 of the Fall 2008 Newsletter. If you would like to join this exploratory committee (no prior experience required) and begin an internet dialogue, email Jim Green at james.green@umb.edu.
- Congratulations to President Mike Honey
At the Southern Historical Association's annual meeting in New Orleans in October 2008, Mike received the H.L. Mitchell Award for southern labor history, for his book, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign (Norton, 2007).
- Jarod Roll Wins 2008
Herbert Gutman Dissertation Prize!
Named in honor of pioneering labor historian Herbert G. Gutman, the award comes with a cash prize of $500 from LAWCHA and a publishing contract with the University of Illinois Press. The prize is contingent upon the author¹s acceptance of the contract with the University of Illinois Press.
Jarod Roll, “Road to the Promised Land: Rural Rebellion in the New Cotton South, 1890-1945,” Northwestern University, 2007.
Jarod Roll’s dissertation is a remarkable reformulation and analysis of social movements among poor rural workers in a particularly compelling setting, the “Bootheel” of Missouri, over a period of almost fifty years. Roll engages many of the issues Herbert Gutman explored in his own pioneering work – particularly the relationship between working-class religion and social movements, the significance of race in working-class communities, and the everyday culture of working people. Particularly striking is the work’s integration of white and African American Pentecostal religion in a series of movements ranging from Knights of Labor and Populism through the Socialist Party, NAACP, and Garvey’s UNIA. Roll locates his forthright revision of older notions of the backwardness of the South in a new religious “Awakening” in the Ozarks and a political and social radicalism that periodically shook the region. Roll is careful not to romanticize this connection, as he uncovers a racist reaction among the same poor whites who built some of these earlier movements. The dissertation employs a remarkably broad range of sources and exceptionally strong writing.
For information about applying for this year's Gutman Prize, please see http://www.lawcha.org/gutman.php
- Laurie B. Green Wins
2008 Philip Taft Labor History Prize!
The 2008 Taft Prize committee, in collaboration with the Labor and Working Class History Association, is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2008 Taft Award in Labor and Working-Class History is Laurie B. Green, for her deeply researched and wide-ranging book, Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle, published by the University of North Carolina Press. Green's book is a highly original contribution to the labor historiography of race, gender, and class in an important southern city during a crucial period for civil rights movement mobilization at the grassroots. Especially significant is Green's examination of the occupational structure and organization of labor in Memphis over three decades, assessing the composition, orientation, and outlook of the Memphis working class as a whole. By showing how the slogan "I am a Man" had great meaning for women, too, Green changes how we think about gender relations in the civil rights movement, in the labor movement, and among working-class women and men. The prize was awarded at the LAWCHA conference in Vancouver on June 6, 2008.
The Taft Prize comes with a cash award of $1,500. It is named in honor of Professor Philip Taft, an eminent labor historian and economist, who made outstanding contributions to the field of labor and working-class history during his lengthy career. The prize competition is administered by the ILR School at Cornell University and has been held annually since 1978. The members of the 2008 Prize committee were: Jefferson Cowie, Ileen DeVault (chair), Nancy Gabin, Stephen Pitti, and Joe Trotter.Visit www.ilr.cornell.edu/taftaward for more information.
- Call for Papers
for Working Class Studies Association
Visit http://www.wcstudies.org/conference/2009cfp.pdf for more information.