The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement, just published by Janine Giordano Drake (Oxford University Press, 2023), chronicles the battles between Christian Socialists and Protestant denominational leaders in the struggle to define the meaning of Christian nationhood.
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Ahmed White recently published Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers. It takes a closer look at the legal and extralegal repression meted out against the Industrial Workers of the World, organized in 1905 as an industrial union committed to organizing all workers in opposition to the American Federation of Labor.
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Joshua Morris has published The Many Worlds of American Communism in September. Morris completed his Ph.D. at Wayne State University and teaches at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Randi Storch asked him some questions about his purpose and findings.
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At least five years before Mexican labor activist Caritina Piña arrived in the working-class barrio of Villa Cecilia in the outskirts of Tampico, Reynalda González Parra had co-founded one of the most radical labor collectives in the entire world. It was 1915 and amid one of the bloodiest revolutions of the twentieth century González Parra, alongside Mexican, Spanish, and other activists, founded the Tampico local of the Casa del Obrero Mundial (COM)—the House of the Global Worker.
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Jenny Carson profiles some of the dynamic early leaders of the New York laundry workers union uprising of the 1930s, and how their fight for a democratic union met resistance from a notable CIO union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. It is a window into her longer treatment in A Matter of Moral Justice, published by University of Illinois Press –editor
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Labor Online interviewed Jacob Zumoff about his new book, The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike last year. In the course of the interview he mentioned the way that this strike creatively used film to build support for the workers cause.
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Toni Gilpin’s The Long Deep Grudge: A Story of Big Capital, Radical Labor, and Class War in the American Heartland details the long conflict between International Harvester and Farm Equipment Workers union, one of the unions deemed Communist by the CIO, and expelled in 1949.
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One hundred years ago this November, a small army of federal agents, backed by police and vigilantes, launched the first of a series of incursions on radical groups that would come to be known as the Palmer Raids, after Attorney General A.
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Think of the greatest strikes in US labor history. Apart from the garment workers’ strikes in New York and Chicago before World War One, none come to mind in which Jews played a major role. But if you look a little closer, you will find Jews as the ferment for a great deal of radical labor activism.
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The waning days of April have a little recognized convergence, inviting us to think about connections between workers issues and environmental concerns.
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