Labor and working-class historians ought to be thinking a lot more about interesting methods of data visualization. The internet is full of fascinating digital presentations that offer a quick understanding of immense amounts of data in forms that are often simple and elegant.

President Obama’s Second Inaugural Address, progressive? Maybe. But only if you are one of the liberals who have forgotten this nation’s working class. A key feature of the president’s message was the absence of a single word: unions.

Was Herbert Hill–the Labor Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for 25 years known for his fierce criticism of labor union racism, and longtime labor and civil rights movement historian at University of Wisconsin–an “FBI informer”?

On August 28, 1963, more than 200,000 people converged at the Lincoln Memorial in a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The assembly occurred in a period of heightened black freedom struggle that was most ferocious in the Deep South but also relentless across the Upper and Border South, Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast.

Jefferson Cowie (JC): Academic disciplines and their subfields are always in some kind of “crisis,” it seems, but for labor history that crisis is pretty real. If I were to look into the future, the best hope might be the turn toward the “History of Capitalism.”