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
We have a few brief summaries of panels and papers from the Labor and Working Class History Association conference, June 2025. Mark Kagan sent his presentation in full from the session on Ruptures in Union Politics and Labor Relations in
This is one of a few brief summaries of panels and papers from the Labor and Working Class History Association conference, June 2025. If you have a comment or summary of a panel or event from LAWCHA2025, send it on
The Hollywood Movie Norma Rae defined working class women’s experiences in the wake of neoliberalism. The film launched Sally Field into a cultural icon, but according to Aimee Loiselle’s new book, it warped the labor history that was the base