Larry Gibson was literally the last man standing on Kayford Mountain in southern West Virginia. The 500 people who once called the community home left as fast as they could when the coal companies started blowing it up. But not Larry, who put a tiny strip of the land in a trust so that it could never be destroyed.
Read more →Keynote by women’s historian Alice Kessler Harris, distinguished professor at Columbia University. Also featuring a round table discussion about the life and work of Amy Swerdlow moderated by Blanch Weisen Cooke. March 1-2, 2013.
Read more →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.
Read more →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.
Read more →CALL FOR PAPERS: “Rights, Solidarity and Justice: Working People Organizing, Past and Present” LAWCHA National Conference, June 6-8, 2013, New York City.
Read more →Ken Germanson, President Emeritus, Wisconsin Labor History Society
If there was any thought that history is irrelevant in today’s world, that was dispelled at the 31st Annual Conference of the Wisconsin Labor History Society held April 21 in Milwaukee.
Read more →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.
Read more →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.
Read more →On the hundredth anniversary of the Bread and Roses textile strike, over 300 labor activists, researchers and community members gathered on April 28 in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The strike, which began on January 11, 1912, was one of the transformative labor victories of the twentieth century.
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