This is the second entry for a symposium on Steven High’s Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022). The book tracks what High calls the “structural violence” and “social ruination” involved in the term deindustrialization.
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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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The new issue of the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History is out, and we are pleased to move Sara Stanford McIntyre’s essay from behind the paywall for three months, thanks to Duke University Press. The essay reveals that women were part of the early oil industry, if in a conflicted position.
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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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