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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Last month in Washington, D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray vetoed the Large Retailer Accountability Act, which would have required corporate retailers with sales of $1 billion or more that operated businesses of at least 750,000 square feet in the District to pay a “living wage.”
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This summer I had the privilege of co-coordinating an NEH Landmark grant at one of the Great Camps in the Adirondacks. Over a two-week period, I got to know eighty teachers as we thought about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era through the lens of the wilderness.
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The battle against teachers and their unions seemed to crescendo last year during Chicago’s teacher strike. The mainstream media had a field day blaming those “lazy teachers” and their “big unions” for the problems facing Chicago’s public school system, the nation and America’s ability to compete in the world.
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President Obama presented his budget proposal in the face of sequestration, the effects of which are slowly making their way into federal programs and offices around the country and the world. Because proposals are just that, proposals — tentative imaginings of which directions the nation may choose to move, Obama’s concession to tie Social Security to chained CPI is troubling and suggests his willingness to further undermine the integrity of our social fabric.
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