Chad Pearson

posts and bio Chad Pearson

Chad Pearson teaches history at University of North Texas. He is the author of Capital’s Terrorists: Anti-Labor Violence in the Long Nineteenth Century (2022) Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and is co-editor with Rosemary Feurer of Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017). book isl

Company Doctors and Working-Class Unrest: Roundtable on Nate Holdren’s Injury Impoverished

by on August 13, 2020

Chad Pearson offers comments on employer violence in understanding workplace injury as part of a roundtable on Nate Holdren’s  Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era, just published by Cambridge University Press. Holdren delves into the history of the emergence of workers’ compensation law in the United States.

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Woodrow Wilson and Anti-Unionists

by on December 1, 2015

How should Americans remember Woodrow Wilson? This is the central question triggered recently by Princeton University protesters who have brought attention to his racism. The protesters have rightly pointed out the loathsome words and actions of the turn-of-the-century pro-segregationist academic, former Princeton head, and two-term United States president.

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Doing the Employer’s Dirty Work?: Thinking about the History of Anti-Unionism from “Below” after the UAW’s Defeat in Chattanooga

by on February 21, 2014

Historians should think carefully as they ponder the meaning of the UAW defeat in Chattanooga. Some analysts write as though a full-fledged co-determination structure was in play. In reality, the union leadership held backroom meetings with Volkswagen executives that promised a commitment that seems all too close to the kind of company unions that labor historians should recognize from the past—joint labor-management organizations designed to lure workers away from democratic control and a voice.

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