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 he 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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Is there life after coal, what future for the collier?
The scab and the hardliner both, wear the blue scars of the miner
Rising up now from the earth, we’re branded and we’re blinded
The sunlight and the dole queue boast, the blue scars of the miner
Is there anything but drink, drugs and last reminders
A single tear drop rolling down, the blue scars of the miner
–Lyrics from the “Blue Scars of the Miner,” The Freakons, 2022.
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In the United States there exists today, and has existed since at least the 1950s, a dominant political narrative according to which most Americans, indeed the very history of the country, exemplify a kind of ideological “moderateness.” Democratic Party operatives and sympathizers constantly preach the virtues of occupying the political center, where most of the population supposedly resides.
Read more →We received the following post from Kim Scipes, objecting to Jeff Schuhrke’s essay about the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy, posted November 22. Schuhrke’s reply to Scipes follows. -ed.
Read more →Editors note: LAWCHA members will be receiving an abbreviated version of this essay in the 2022 newsletter. We are glad to be able to post the entire interview with Leon Fink, retiring editor of Labor: Studies in Working Class History here.
Read more →Duke University Press released the top-read essays of 2022 from LAWCHA’s journal, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History (volume 19). The articles are freely available until January 31, 2023. Pass along this opportunity to sample these essays.
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A Conversation between Emily E. LB. Twarog and Michael Hillard, author of Shredding Paper: The Rise and Fall of Maine’s Mighty Paper Industry (Cornell University Press, 2020)
I grew up not far from the banks of the Androscoggin River,[1] a river that powered the textile and paper mills of central Maine, and, every summer, I return to Maine to visit family.
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Chad Pearson recently interviewed Bryan Palmer about this new book, James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-1938 (Leiden and Boston: Brill 2020; Chicago: Haymarket, 2021).
Why did you write this book?
There are many levels on which one could answer such a question.
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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.
Read more →While labor historians have organized a letter signing campaign to the Biden administration asking them to grant some concession to rail workers, others have pointed out the continuing tepid response of labor leadership as the cause of this crisis. Is the Democratic Party in charge of the labor movement?
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