posts and bio
James Gregory
James Gregory is Professor of History and Director of the Racial Restrictive Covenants Project – Washington State at the University of Washington.
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On April 23, 2023, the Washington state legislature passed the Covenants Homeownership Act (CHA), pioneering legislation that will provide compensation to victims of the racist restrictive covenants that destroyed opportunities for generations of Black, Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous families. Historians have been working in dozens of locations to document the extent and impact of racial restrictive covenants, finding them in thousands of neighborhoods and showing that they have a close connection to today’s disparate rates of homeownership and wealth.
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An election looms. An unpopular president wrestles with historic unemployment rates. Demonstrations erupt in hundreds of locations. The president deploys Army units to suppress peaceful protests in the nation’s capital. And most of all he worries about an affable Democratic candidate who is running against him without saying much about a platform or plans.
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2019 marks the 150th anniversary of the Knights of Labor, the most important labor movement of the Gilded Age. It is worth thinking anew about that organization and not just because of that anniversary. We are now deep in the second Gilded Age and if we look back to that earlier age of plutocrats, it becomes clear that we are repeating more than a label.
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Last September, Georgette Fleischer, one of the leaders of a long fight to organize contingent faculty at Barnard College, wrote an article for LAWCHA's LaborOnline detailing the struggle and explaining why the new union, UAW Local 2210, had voted to strike. In June, Dr. Fleischer learned that she had been fired. After 17 years of teaching in the College’s First-Year Foundation programs, she was out.
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Amy Goodman spoke with Duke University historian and former LAWCHA president Nancy MacLean, author of the new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. MacLean uncovers the instrumental role the late libertarian economist James Buchanan played in the right’s campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting and privatize schools.
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It is with a heavy heart that I forward the news that Judith Stein has passed
away after a long struggle with cancer. A dedicated member of LAWCHA, she was a
Distinguished Professor of History at City College and
Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author of key books
and articles.
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This blog introduces LAWCHA’s newest and most important initiative. Last year, with encouragement from past president Nancy MacLean, an ad hoc committee drafted proposals that the Board of Directors adopted at its April 2016 meeting, most importantly creating the Committee on Contingent Faculty which manages this blog.
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With great sadness we mark the passing of James Green, former president of LAWCHA, scholar, activist, and mentor to countless labor historians. He died yesterday following a long battle with cancer.
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Bernie Sanders has come close. And in doing so he has demonstrated that in 2016 the label democratic socialist is no longer a third-rail in American politics. This makes it a good time to talk about American political history and to contemplate the socialist movement of a century ago, when socialists won elections in more than 350 cities and towns, when more than 380 weekly and daily newspapers affiliated with the Socialist Party, when socialism was popular in states and counties that now vote solidly conservative.
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