I am a historian who studied with David Montgomery at the University of Pittsburgh in the mid-1970s, a tumultuous time in labor and working-class history. After teaching at Wesleyan University for many years, I returned to the once-mighty steel city.
Kent Wong, long time Director of the UCLA Labor Center, passed away October 8 at the age of 69. He will be remembered as an inspiring speaker, a fearless advocate for working people, and visionary labor educator who never wavered
Thanks to Professor Rosemary Feurer and the LaborOnline team for another opportunity to interview Robert W. Cherny, this time about his 2024 book, The Coit Tower Murals: New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco. Dr. Cherny is emeritus
In his new memoir, An Ordinary White: My Antiracist Education (2025), David Roediger provides a moving account of his lifetime of scholarship and activism. Beginning with his upbringing in a Midwestern sundown town, Roediger offers an account of how the
LAWCHA has issued a powerful statement of support for LAWCHA member and historian Tom Alter, who was recently fired without due process from his tenured position at Texas State University in San Marcos. There is an urgent public campaign as
I know you’re busy, dear labor history colleagues, so I’m going to put this ask right at the top even though it messes up the flow of my essay a little: please sign this petition opposing the closure of the
In Para Power: How Paraprofessional Labor Changed Education, Nick Juravich shows that the job category we know today as “paraprofessionals” in education was initially conceived as a cheaper way to distribute care labor within urban schools managing the baby boom.
Abundance (2025) by Ezra Klein and William ThompsonWhat remains to be said about Abundance, the book that’s launched a thousand takes? Authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson cast their book as a novel approach grounded in fresh progressive visions focused
Over the last two years, the City of Fayetteville, Arkansas, working with the University of Arkansas Humanities Center, has erected a historical marker, renamed a major street, and sponsored a public mural to honor Nelson Hackett, an enslaved worker who
This is one of a small number of postings from the LAWCHA 2025 conference panels. If you have a summary from the conference, we’d be glad to add it.The “Workers and the U.S. Civil War” panel explored various experiences of