Ahmed White recently published Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers. It takes a closer look at the legal and extralegal repression meted out against the Industrial Workers of the World, organized in 1905 as an industrial union committed to organizing all workers in opposition to the American Federation of Labor.
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Joshua Morris has published The Many Worlds of American Communism in September. Morris completed his Ph.D. at Wayne State University and teaches at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Randi Storch asked him some questions about his purpose and findings.
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Donna Haverty-Stacke recently published The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist, available from New York University Press. Haverty-Stacke examines Grace Holmes Carlson’s commitment to revolutionary Marxism and Catholicism in her life-long battles against social and economic inequality.
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David Witwer and Catherine Rios recently published Murder in the Garment District: The Grip of Organized Crime and the Decline of Labor in the United States. It tells of racketeering and union corruption in 20th century New York, when unions and the mob shaped working class lives.
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Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland details the long conflict between International Harvester and Farm Equipment Workers union, one of the unions deemed Communist by the CIO, and expelled in 1949.
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Our series of interviews with authors of new books in labor and working-class history continues with Ryan Pettengill, author of the new book, Communists and Community: Activism in Detroit’s Labor Movement, 1941-1956, published by Temple University Press this year. Pettengill teaches at Mountain View College.
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Ed: This is one of a series of conference notes from the recent LAWCHA conference. If you have reflections from one of the panels or plenaries, please send them along.
Teaching Labor’s Story: A Mission and a Workshop
The Trump years and rise of white nationalism in the United States and Europe has given new urgency to the work of the Labor and Working-Class History Association and to democracy-loving historians.
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A new LAWCHA initiative to develop classroom and public knowledge of labor history
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For five-days “Fighting Inequality” conference (May 2015) participants critically considered ways, then and now, that working-class people experience and struggle against class inequality. One of the conference’s highlights was the session, “Fighting Inequality through Teaching, Scholarship and Activism: A Roundtable Discussion on the Career of Jim Barrett” where panelists shared ways that Barrett’s contributions to the field of labor and working class history offer an inspiring model of how to balance scholarly excellence with civic engagement.
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Margaret Peterson Haddix’s historical novel Uprising provides a valuable resource for those of us interested in engaging our students in their real-life drama that animates labor history.
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