Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas最新文献

{"title":"Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War","authors":"Claire Goldstene","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581531","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581531","url":null,"abstract":"In 2011, I was teaching a post–Civil War US survey course focused on labor history called “Work and Community” (a title and orientation I had happily inherited) and assiduously trying to explain to a room full of somewhat baffled undergraduates why late nineteenth-century labor activists had described their industrial working conditions as “wage slavery” and what they had meant. For most students it was a peculiar phrase—wage and slave were not words they associated with one another—that felt consigned to a distant and strange past. A couple of weeks later I happened to travel up to New York for the weekend, visited Occupy Wall Street, and returned to teach the next week wearing a T-shirt that read, “Free the Wage Slaves.” Suddenly, and amid our shared laughter, this historical phrase seemed more immediately present.Ideas about historical memory and the uses of the past deeply inform Matthew E. Stanley's layered Grand Army of Labor: Workers, Veterans, and the Meaning of the Civil War. As part of a growing literature centered on the diverse efforts to shape Civil War memory in its near aftermath, Stanley explores both the meaning and the memory of that war in the fraught battles between labor and capital during the Long Gilded Age. The book focuses particularly on struggles, some more and some less successful, to extend the war's emancipationist promise to wage labor and the robust debates about how to understand the dichotomy between slave and free labor that infused labor activism during those years. In arguing for the relevance of historical memory as source material, Stanley explicitly roots culture in social conditions while also acknowledging its power to influence perception. Thus, he argues that “representations of the Civil War in particular were critical to the development of class consciousness in the United States” (4). This work to develop class consciousness took place in “union halls, third party campaigns, printing houses, and shop floors” (97). Through the presentation of varied Civil War memories, Stanley reveals how different groups of working people in the decades after 1865 viewed the past and how that, in turn, informed their view of their present.By delving into the specifics of how multiple groups—the Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, Populists, socialists, and AFL—both debated and connected their Civil War remembrances and commemorations to their respective ideological and strategic platforms, Stanley illustrates how those memories also shaped these organizing platforms. While the leaders and activists that populate Stanley's book appreciated the rhetorical power of contrasting slave and wage labor, they did not necessarily agree about how best to do that. Here Stanley identifies two main modes of thought—one that saw the Civil War as ushering in the liberation of all workers in a manner that went beyond “the idea that emancipation meant only the absence of bondage” (28) and another focused on preserving the Union and the pl","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"95 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Harlem Uprising: Segregation and Inequality in Postwar New York City","authors":"Michael Woodsworth","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581475","url":null,"abstract":"Two horrific deaths on the streets of New York, fifty years apart, illustrate the persistence of police brutality in the nation's largest city. On July 16, 1964, James Powell, a fifteen-year-old taking summer classes in Manhattan's Yorkville neighborhood, was shot by an off-duty police lieutenant across the street from his school. On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner was placed in a chokehold by a plainclothes officer while selling loose cigarettes on a sidewalk in Staten Island; Garner's dying words were “I can't breathe.” Both victims were Black. Both cops—Thomas Gilligan and Daniel Pantaleo—were white. Neither faced charges.Why was the New York Police Department (NYPD) allowed to act with such impunity for so long? A powerful new book by Christopher Hayes offers answers. The Harlem Uprising focuses on the six-day outpouring of rage and grief set off by Powell's death. Hayes illustrates how the uprising activated deep-seated racism in the city, and how subsequent efforts to increase civilian oversight of the NYPD stoked a ferocious backlash led by the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) and its conservative allies. In the years that followed, the PBA would wield its growing political clout against any and all attempts to rein in the police.The book's opening chapters explain, in meticulous detail, how racism was woven into the fabric of New York life. In the early 1960s, as the civil rights movement was cresting, most Black New Yorkers were living in deteriorating housing, attending failing schools, and facing dwindling job opportunities while being systematically marginalized by the city's labor unions. If America was an “affluent society,” Harlem and Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood were in the depths of an “ignored postwar depression” (33). Black communities were at once overpoliced and underpoliced, victims of both brutality and crime. Hayes reveals shocking corruption within the NYPD: officers saw Harlem as a “Gold Coast” where they could line their pockets by tapping into the heroin trade and numbers rackets. This sowed feelings of deep mistrust and powerlessness among Black New Yorkers.Those feelings erupted after Powell's killing. Drawing on contemporary newspaper reports, Hayes offers a vivid, hour-by-hour account of the protests, looting, and violence that gripped the city. Harlemites jeered, taunted, and lobbed bottles at NYPD units, who sometimes responded with bullets. Appeals for calm by old-guard civil rights leaders (Bayard Rustin, James Farmer) mostly fell on deaf ears. By July 20, rioting had spread across the East River to Bed-Stuy. When it was all over, one person had died, and the official toll also included 95 injured civilians, 50 injured police officers, 504 arrests, and 678 damaged businesses.Though it ignited the “long hot summers” of the 1960s, the Harlem uprising has until recently been overshadowed by deadlier sequels: Watts, Detroit, Newark. Hayes builds on a growing body of research about police brutality in Ne","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor's Introduction","authors":"Leon Fink","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581251","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581251","url":null,"abstract":"Three very different projects discussed in this issue highlight the political challenge of perceived racial difference for liberal and social democratic forces in the twentieth-century West. In the first article Latin American specialist Heidi Tinsman probes the issue of labor control and lack of rights among Chinese contract laborers in postslavery 1870s Peru from an original angle. Through the activities of special Chinese envoy Yung Wing, sent to survey the conditions of Chinese contract workers on Peruvian plantations, we gather at once the contemporary power and the limitations of an antislavery discourse as applied to a new migrant workforce. Yet even as Qing dynasty officials, whom Yung Wing represented, registered a compelling critique of Western hubris in international relations, that critique, Tinsman indicates, did not fully resonate with the perspective, or aspirations, of the contract laborers themselves.Fifty years on from the debate over whether conditions of immigrant contract laborers were like or unlike slavery, Second International socialists meeting at the World Migration Congress of 1926 in London believed that they had transcended a blinkered and racist past and arrived at a moment of “color-blind solidarity among all peoples of the world.” Their enthusiasm, as historian Lucas Poy documents in an exhumation of discussions among socialist parties and trade unions, was of course premature. While happy to declaim in principle against colonialism and imperialism, Western worker representatives betrayed deep assumptions of racial hierarchy and social Darwinian justifications for national just deserts, as most evident in “White Australia” rhetoric and broader defenses of immigration restrictions. Poy concludes that within the “inter-nationalism” of the period, the delegates’ “common sense of belonging to International Labour . . . never included the coloured/colonial peoples.”Kelly Lytle Hernández's Bad Mexicans, our Bookmark selection for books published in 2022, not only offers a vivid retelling of the roots of the Mexican Revolution through the transborder perspective of the anarchist movement centered on the Flores Magón brothers but also sets up—as our three reviewers attest—a fascinating discussion of the broader public purposes of historical research and writing. As a group the reviewers are at once enthralled by Lytle Hernández's narrative power and divided on her claims as to the significance of Ricardo Flores Magón and the Partido Liberal Mexicano in the larger events that led to revolutionary upheaval in Mexico that began in 1910. Especially given the magonistas’ focus on the machinery of US repression, Elliott Young wonders why “they mostly stayed in the United States after the bullets started flying in Mexico.” An accomplished transborder scholar herself, Sonia Hernández also seems to draw more lessons from the “defeat” of a “potentially transformative democratization” by Magón and company than from any putative victo","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Author's Response","authors":"Kelly Lytle Hernández","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581349","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581349","url":null,"abstract":"I want to begin by thanking Labor: Studies in Working-Class History for selecting Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Rebellion in the Borderlands as its Big Book for 2022. It has been an honor to engage with the Labor and Working-Class History Association community and, especially, with Sonia Hernández, John Tutino, and Elliott Young, who so graciously accepted invitations to read and comment on the book. I will keep my reflections brief, as the readers have all made fair critiques of Bad Mexicans, including its strengths and weaknesses.Elliott Young and Sonia Hernández both comment on the book's embrace of a transnational approach to history. Young, who cofounded the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas, an institute I once attended back in 2008, writes that Bad Mexicans joins a forgotten but reemerging tradition of telling “stories that cross and spill over borders.” As he notes, the first page of Bad Mexicans jumps the border, launching a narrative “journey that weaves back and forth across the US-Mexico border to tell a story of a transnational anticapitalist movement at the birth of revolutionary Mexico.” Hernández, herself an intrepid chronicler of cross-border and revolutionary histories, writes that “magonismo, in many ways the perfect subject for a transnational study, lends itself to creating models of scholarship based on transnational, global efforts of solidarity.” Writing a borderlands history, one that sits comfortably at the intersection of nations and within an orbit of its own (“ni de aquí ni de allá,” as Hernández's grandmother might put it) was certainly one of my goals with this book. I am thrilled that these two distinguished historians of transnational history have identified the book's borderlands frame as well executed.Each reviewer notes that historians of the Mexican Revolution debate the “importance of the magonistas in the course of the [Mexican] revolution,” given that relatively few Mexicans, on either side of the border, actively supported the magonistas in their all-out “war on capital, authority, and the Church.” As John Tutino details, the magonista platform was too anticlerical and too liberal for mass support. Similarly, as Hernández observes, leading voices among the magonistas, namely Ricardo Flores Magón and Librado Rivera, “lost many allies who saw them as intransigent and stubborn.” In turn, the magonistas “never provoke[d] mass mobilizations, while thousands joined Villista risings just across the border and thousands more rose in Zapatista communities south of Mexico City.” Elliott Young makes the point with an important question—“Just who were these protagonists of the Mexican Revolution?”—and notes that Bad Mexicans does not address how the magonistas ideologically jived with the various factions that went on to fight in the revolution. These observations are correct. The magonistas did not lead the Mexican Revolution, the 1917 Mexican Constitution was not as radical as they ","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Since the Boom: Continuity and Change in the Western Industrialized World after 1970","authors":"Lutz Raphael","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581573","url":null,"abstract":"This book deals with a research topic that has become highly politicized since the Trump presidency in the United States and the rise of strong nationalist and right-wing populist movements in Europe: the social and political upheaval linked to what is commonly described or named as the deindustrialization of the advanced capitalist countries in the West after 1970. Historians have been—by profession—shy to engage in debates on the present crises of Western democracies or the decline of organized labor due to the dismantling of large sectors of traditional industries “in the Western Industrialized World” (as this book calls western Europe and North America). But attitudes changed under the impact of present political conflicts. Today the door is open to innovative empirical research looking back to the last decades of the twentieth century and searching for the long-term consequences of the decrease of jobs in industry, mass unemployment, and increasing social and economic inequalities in the highly industrialized countries of the West.The German historian Sebastian Voigt has edited a book whose contributors engage such questions. Until very recently, most historians working on the transformation of industrial societies in the 1970s or 1980ss concentrated on national cases. This volume tries to transcend this status quo and open comparative views starting from the recent German debate about the transformations “since the boom.” In the German debate this term means that the end of the postwar period of high growth rates, based on high industrial output and employment, opened an era of cultural and political uncertainty and structural change. It ended around the turn of the millennium when new economic, social, and political patterns crystallized.This book uses case studies in West Germany, the United Kingdom, and France to echoes approaches dealing with the 1970s and 1980s as years of what Bruce Schulman has called “the great shift in American culture, society and politics.” For example, Jessica Burch writes on direct selling as a flexible response to mass unemployment and the loss of industrial jobs, and Eileen Boris examines the precarity of migrant domestic workers, mostly women, whose number grew rapidly as a result of the rising demand in middle- and upper-class families and couples profiting from their rise of income. These two case studies illustrate the social consequences of this shift in the United States, where the political, cultural, and social ruptures were much deeper than in western European countries. These two case studies must be read with an eye to the background of increasing economic inequality, deepening regional differences, and rising culture wars. Even the UK case, while generally nearest to the United States, is different. Sina Fabian underlines the ongoing growth of private consumption during the 1970s. The return of mass poverty in Britain resulted from the economic shock therapy of the Thatcher government during the c","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"103 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The “World Migration Congress” of 1926 and the Limits of Socialist Internationalism","authors":"Lucas Poy","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581293","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In recent years, scholars doing research on the anticommunist and social democratic tradition developed an interpretation in which socialist internationalism is portrayed not as opposed to nationalism but instead as complementary. This allowed them to move away from older perspectives and to examine the main features of international cooperation among socialists in a more positive light. Its substantial and convincing contributions notwithstanding, this literature also displays important shortcomings. Not only does it minimize the challenge that nationalism did pose to transnational solidarities; it is also too focused on Europe and therefore overlooks a more serious limit to internationalism, namely a perspective that proclaimed a principle of color-blind solidarity among all peoples of the world but in practice built a much more limited transnational community of workers either born in Europe or of European descent. This article engages with these historiographical trends and complicates our knowledge of socialist internationalism in the 1920s by exploring a unique and underresearched event, the “World Migration Congress,” held in London in 1926 and jointly organized by the International Federation of Trade Unions and the Labour and Socialist International, the main transnational networks of trade unionists and political parties of the social democratic tradition. Drawing on the idea that international organizations and meetings can be used as “observation points” for studying global history, the article uses the prolegomena to, the preparations for, and the discussions of this congress as a lens to understand the stances of socialist parties and reformist trade unions regarding the question of migration in the 1920s, explaining to what extent, and for what reason, they have changed in comparison with the prewar period. Moreover, it shows that the stances on migration were intertwined in many ways with socialist and labor perspectives on colonialism and condescending views of the “colored peoples” of the world.","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Seeking Revolution in the US-Mexican Borderlands","authors":"John Tutino","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581307","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581307","url":null,"abstract":"The revolution that began in Mexico in 1910–11 generated pivotal transformations in Mexico and North America. Political wars and social insurgencies mixed to forge a new Mexican regime that promised—and partially delivered—radical land redistributions, unprecedented labor rights, and resource nationalizations that brought new possibilities to Mexicans and newly complex and always contested ties between Mexico and the United States. The Porfirio Díaz regime, which ruled Mexico from 1876 to 1911, had mixed political closures with often predatory liberal development. Postrevolutionary Mexico was no utopia, but popular pressures forced changes that benefited many—while driving others north in search of work and new lives, building an expansive Mexican America on once-Mexican lands.1Attempts to understand the origins, conflicts, and consequences of Mexico's decade of revolution persist and evolve, long shaped by political polarities, shifting ideologies, and changing interests in Mexico, the United States, and beyond. We now see the decade of revolution that began in 1910 not as a singular process but as a mix of contradictory conflicts—social and political, cultural and gendered—grounded in Mexico yet always engaging US interests and powers, always tied to larger global challenges marked by the First and Second World Wars and, between them, the Great Depression.2Kelly Lytle Hernández's Bad Mexicans now offers a culminating new analysis of the roots and limits of Mexico's revolution in borderlands that by 1910 were becoming ever more transnational. Focusing on Ricardo Flores Magón and the movement he sparked, she brings new understanding to key political conflicts that preceded the revolution and marked its beginnings.The political and ideological efforts of Flores Magón and the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) are long recognized. The year 1968 proved pivotal: James Cockroft published Precursors of the Mexican Revolution, bringing the PLM to the center of transnational historical conversations;3 John Womack followed with Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, detailing the agrarian insurrections that surged south of Mexico City as PLM challenges waned in the North.4 And Luis González y González offered Pueblo en vilo, the history of a town steeped in religion that stood aside from the revolution swirling all around—to later rise against “revolutionary” powers in the 1920s.5Also in 1968, the Mexican regime killed hundreds of protesting students at Tlatelolco, then hosted the Olympics to proclaim the nation's global emergence; there, on the global stage of Mexico City's Olympic Stadium, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists to protest US racism. That year demanded new understandings of the inseparable histories of Mexico and the United States—and the revolution that tied them together in enduring contradictions.It was also in 1968 that Adolfo Gilly, an Argentine held in Díaz's Lecumberri Penitentiary for running guns from Chiapas to Guatemalan rebe","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Ballad of 411 Dunsmuir St., Vancouver, BC","authors":"Tom Wayman","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581265","url":null,"abstract":"Its four stories still feature large windows,grey marble cladding at street leveland, above that, tan-colored brick. The structurecould be any downtown commercial buildingconstructed in 1912. Yet the place is a cenotaphwith an illegible inscription, is a union anthemdrowned out by traffic. The first fist hitsVic Midgley: pain explodes from his right ribsand before he can parry more, a punchslams into his jaw from the left.A constable has gunned down Albert Goodwin,evading the draft after he helped leadthe struggle for the eight-hour day at Trail's smelter.This while people still rememberhow some years before, the policeshot and killed Frank Rogers on picket dutyat the CPR yards. Midgley dodgesbut a swung chair legconnects with his face. In response toGoodwin's killing, the first civic general strikein Canada is underway this August afternoon.A fist plows into Midgley's stomach. He gaspsfor air, collapses forward. Throughout the buildingwindows are being smashed, records and filespulled from desks and cabinets and scatteredor tossed along with furniture onto the pavement.The strike is a protest, too, at four yearsof the pointless War to End All Wars in France.Once the streetcars stopped running,chamber of commerce membersorganized a mob of veterans to attackstrike supporters, directing them here tothe Trades and Labour Council's six-year-oldlabour temple, the largest west of Chicago. Midgley,Council secretary, has curled himself on the floor.A boot ploughs into his right side: twelve-, fourteen-,sixteen-hour work days. Another kick: subsistencewages. A rain of boots: no government charity—you find employment or starve. No safety standards.If injured on the job and can't work, your only recourseis sue the boss, as if you could afford that,let alone pay a doctor. Make him kiss the flag,someone shouts. The banner is slapped againstMidgley's face. Blood from his nose andthe sockets of his broken-off teeth stain the fabric.The building is lost to the Council in 1920but its song endures. Why should we who work,the lyrics proclaim, have no sayin how the wealth we create is spent?Why does democracy cease at the factory gate,the office door? Because of our jobs, the city livesanother day. Yet authority wants us invisible,productive, obedient. For now we are nothingto them. But we shall be free. We shallbe all.","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135387641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Seat at the Table: An Interview with the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers","authors":"John W. McKerley","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581363","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581363","url":null,"abstract":"Research Article| September 01 2023 A Seat at the Table: An Interview with the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers John W. McKerley John W. McKerley JOHN W. MCKERLEY is an oral historian, photographer, and audio producer whose work focuses on labor and civil rights organizing in the South and Midwest. Since 2013, he has served as the oral historian at the University of Iowa Labor Center, where he manages the Iowa Labor History Oral Project, an almost fifty-year-old collaboration to document the lives of Iowa workers and their unions. His recent publications include an edited interview with photojournalist David Bacon, “Social Justice Writing and Photography: The Reality Check and Beyond,” which appeared in the Routledge Handbook of the Anthropology of Labor, edited by Sharryn Kasmir and Lesley Gill, in 2022. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2023) 20 (3): 85–98. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581363 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation John W. McKerley; A Seat at the Table: An Interview with the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers. Labor 1 September 2023; 20 (3): 85–98. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581363 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search student worker, organizing, Grinnell College, Iowa Copyright © 2023 by Labor and Working-Class History Association2023 You do not currently have access to this content.","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Where Are the Workers? Labor's Stories at Museums and Historic Sites","authors":"Nick Juravich","doi":"10.1215/15476715-10581419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10581419","url":null,"abstract":"“Class is central to everyday life,” write Robert Forrant and Mary Anne Trasciatti in the introduction to their new edited collection, Where Are the Workers? Labor's Stories at Museums and Historic Sites. “Yet,” they continue, “the stories of how working-class people have fought for . . . things that make life worth living remain unfamiliar to large numbers of Americans” (1). Forrant and Trasciatti detail the reasons for this unfamiliarity, from the precipitous decline of organized labor (and, with it, the spaces and occasions in which workers and their communities once encountered this history) to the “abysmal” state of labor history education in public schools, as well as at many museums and public historical sites. Thankfully, they note, “public historians have called for more public histories of labor” over the past decade, and these calls have coincided with renewed worker militancy across many professions and regions of the United States (2). “The time is ripe,” Forrant and Trasciatti argue, “for an expansion of place-based public labor history” (4). Where Are the Workers? is their effort to catalog and analyze how and where place-based public labor history is happening already and why it is indeed so urgent.The collection is impressively wide-ranging and diverse. Forrant and Trasciatti are experienced practitioners in well-known public labor history projects, but in compiling this volume, they have reached well beyond the familiar. Workers of many races, generations, and occupations are represented herein, and the practitioners chronicling their struggles are equally varied. They include museum founders, curators reinterpreting beloved spaces, and archivists and organizers working together to preserve and present new records of working-class lives and labors. Many readers will find one or two chapters in Where Are the Workers? that speak directly to their interests, or belong on their syllabi, while those seeking surveys of both public history and labor history will find the collection useful as an overview.In keeping with Forrant and Trasciatti's charge to show how public history can inform and inspire present and future struggles, the authors in part I of the volume offer useful insights on the programs and partnerships they have built, as well as the history they curate. The West Virginia Mine Wars Museum was inspired by the state's 2018 teacher strike—in which educators donned the red bandannas worn by striking miners a century earlier—to establish annual “Red Bandanna” awards honoring the work of organizers in West Virginia today. In Barre, Vermont; Lawrence, Massachusetts; and Columbus, Georgia, curators and educators have embraced ongoing processes of reinterpretation that incorporate new sites, new institutional partnerships, and new perspectives, with the goal of creating “spaces defined by doing, not by being” (44).Karen Sieber and Elijah Gaddis's chapter on the Loray Mill is exemplary in its discussions of process. The authors d","PeriodicalId":43329,"journal":{"name":"Labor-Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135389976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}