posts categorized asLabor History

CFP: SLSA, The Many Souths (deadline: 9/14)

by on August 22, 2012

The Southern Labor Studies Association is soliciting panels for its (March 7-9) 2013 conference in New Orleans, LA. The conference theme, the “Many Souths,” invites a broad range of panels on southern working-class history, while at the same time it asks participants to examine how we have conceptualized the region: as rural and/or urban; as a single region, or as multiple sub-regions, e.g.

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OAH Announces David Montgomery Book Award Fund — Donate Today

by on August 16, 2012

David Montgomery, former president of the Organization of American Historians (1999–2000), passed away in December 2011. David was the Farnam Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, and a leading figure in the modern field of labor and working-class history. He was also the tireless mentor to a generation of graduate students, first at the University of Pittsburgh and then at Yale.

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LAWCHA Member Paul Ortiz on Emancipation Day in Florida

by on May 21, 2012

LAWCHA Member Paul Ortiz wrote a stunning article on the nearly uncelebrated Emancipation Day, May 20, in Florida. He writes, “Today, May 20, is Emancipation Day in Florida. In order to commemorate this magnificent event–which is all but forgotten in the Sunshine State–the Coalition of Immokalee Workers asked me to write a short essay on the significance of Emancipation Day in a state where slavery is still a fact of life for thousands of workers in our agricultural industry.

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LAWCHA Member Cindy Hahamovitch Wins 2012 Taft Prize

by on May 15, 2012

Based on extensive research in archival collections and oral history interviews across national and imperial borders, Cindy Hahamovitch offers an incisive and expansive history of Jamaican “guestworkers” in the United States since World War II. Revealing the intricate dynamics between local and global contexts and between individual aspirations and corporate demands, Hahamovitch’s engrossing interpretation stands as a cautionary tale of how state regulation of labor migration produced working conditions detrimental to all workers, especially to guestworkers subjected to a permanent state of deportability.

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