This is the third in a series that updates and extends John McKerley’s essay in the current issue of Labor: Studies in Working Class History, which is freely available for three months, thanks to Duke University Press. The first post is here.
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Check out the latest Teaching Labor’s Story: DRUM List of Demands, 1969 (9.4) has been posted along with our growing list of guided lesson plans.
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Lucas Poy writes about the questions and some of the conclusions of his recently published essay in Labor: Studies of Working Class History on the World Migration Congress of 1926, organized by left-wing labor leaders and social democrats. How have socialists and labor leaders in the “global north” approached the subject of migration?
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“Logan County Bristles with Machine Guns… Gaunt Hollow-eyed Men hold Ridges…Every Path is Guarded.” On September 1st, 1921, Washington Times announced that headline from West Virginia. Ten thousand armed coal miners occupied Blair Mountain in the state’s southern coalfields. In pitched mountainside battles in the days afterward, the miners aimed their rifles at local and federal law enforcement, who responded with machine guns, bombs and poison gas, exchanging thousands of rounds of ammunition.
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I became a labor historian in the spring of 2014. This was unexpected. I was already in the third year of a doctoral program in the history department at Columbia University, studying war and memory in United States political culture. For PhD programs, the end of the third year is a little late in the day to switch topics, let alone sub-disciplines.
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The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement, just published by Janine Giordano Drake (Oxford University Press, 2023), chronicles the battles between Christian Socialists and Protestant denominational leaders in the struggle to define the meaning of Christian nationhood.
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By William A. Herbert, Jacob Apkarian and Joseph van der Naald*
As this report documents, the recent uptick in union organizing has not been large enough to reverse the long-term decline in union density, yet the labor movement revitalization of the post-pandemic period is nevertheless an important development.
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Ian Rocksborough-Smith interviewed William D. Riddell about his new book On the Waves of Empire: U.S. Imperialism and Merchant Sailors, 1872-1924, published by the University of Illinois Press in 2023. Set mainly in the years preceding and following the Spanish-American War (1898) through World War I (1914-1918) and its aftermath, the book looks especially at the experiences of merchant sailors, their unions, and their labor leaders to indicate how class conflict impacted America’s emergent 20th Century empire.
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