LAWCHA is at the OAH this year. Read below for the list of panels and events hosted by or co-sponsored by LAWCHA.
Key events:
- Plenary “Remembering David Montgomery” on Friday afternoon, 3-4:30 pm
- Friday Evening Reception 7-9 pm (co-sponsored by LAWCHA and the Wisconsin Labor History Society)
- Annual Meeting, Saturday, 12-1:30 pm
Thursday, 4/19
10:30 – 12:00 | New Historical Perspectives on Municipal Government Activism and Labor
Chair/Commentator: Cecelia Bucki
Commentator: Philip Ethington
“A Contested Public Space: The La Guardia Administration and Labor’s Place in the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair,” Daniel London
“The Evolution of Public Authorities as Tools for Activist Local Government,” Gail Radford
“Milwaukee’s Municipal Socialists in a Global Context: the Politics of Place and the Meaning of Socialist Activism in the City, 1900 – 1920,” Shelton Stromquist
1:30 – 3:00 | From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Rise of Punitive Policy at the Federal, State, and Local Levels
Chair: Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Commentator: Heather Ann Thompson
“Arming the Footsoldiers: The Nixon Administration and Federal Investment in Urban Police Forces,” Elizabeth Kai Hinton
“Embracing Punishment: The Demise of the Rehabilitative Ideal and the Rise of Punitive Criminal Sentencing in California, 1968 – 1980,” Julilly Kohler-Hausmann
“Warring on Poverty is Warring on Crime: The Problem of Crime in the Great Society, 1964 – 1968,” Jessica Neptune
3:30 – 5:00 | African American Workers throughout the Long Civil Rights Movement: Political Action, Trade Unionism, and Urban Space
Chair: David Hamilton Golland
Commentator: Jefferson Cowie
“Constructing Equal Employment Opportunity: Arthur Fletcher and the Philadelphia Plan, 1969 – 1971,” David Hamilton Golland
“‘A Decent Living’: African American Women’s Labor Activism, Urban Politics, and the Early Civil Rights Movement in St. Louis, 1930 – 51,” Keona K. Ervin
“Ben Gross and UAW Local 560: How the Civil Rights Movement and Labor Movement Intersected into Black Liberation Politics in Postwar Silicon Valley, 1945 – 1968,” Herbert G. Ruf?n II
3:30 – 5:00 | At the Crossroads: Joe Trotter, the Syntheses of African American, Urban, Public, and Labor Histories
Chair: Liesl Miller Orenic
Eric Fure-Slocum
Karen Gibson
Earl Lewis
Robin Muhammad
3:30 – 5:00 | Roundtable: New Perspectives on Antislavery and Abolitionism
Moderator: Bruce Laurie
Seymour Drescher
Jonathan Earle
Graham Hodges
Julie Roy Jeffrey
Manisha Sinha
3:30 – 5:00 | Roundtable: Religion, Corporate Capitalism, and Democracy in the Twentieth Century
Chair/Commentator: David Chappell
Kate Bowler
Darren Dochuk
Darren Grem
Kathryn Lofton
Bethany Moreton
3:30 – 5:00 | Poverty Pedagogy Roundtable: Enlisting the History of Poverty to Change the Public Conversation
Chair: Robert Korstad
James L. Leloudis
Joseph A. McCartin
Annelise Orleck
Rachel F. Seidman
Friday, 4/20
8:30 – 10:00 | Whose Civil Rights Stories on the Web? Authorship, Ownership, Access, and Content in Digital History
Chair: Jack Dougherty
“March on Milwaukee: Creating a Local Civil Rights Digital Archive,” Jasmine Alinder
“Omeka for Collecting Stories with Local Communities,” Sheila Brennan
“Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project,” Thomas Ikeda
“The Bracero History Archive,” Peter Liebhold
“On the Line: a Web-Book on Schooling, Housing, and Civil Rights,” Candace Simpson
8:30 – 10:00 | New Perspectives on Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Public Policy: Authors of Recent Books Converse
Chair: Christopher Brick
Commentators: Kim Warren
Blanche Wiesen Cook
“Eleanor Roosevelt: Transformative First Lady,” Maurine H. Beasley
“She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker,” Brigid O’Farrell
“Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: An Extraordinary Marriage,” Hazel Rowley {{deceased}}
8:30 – 10:00 | The Return of Political Economy?
Chair: Robin Einhorn
Sven Beckert
Jefferson Cowie
Kimberly Phillips-Fein
Adolph Reed
Richard White
8:30 – 10:00 | Bread and Roses Today: The Legacy of the 1912 Lawrence Strike
Chair: Ardis Cameron
Julius Getman
Jennifer Guglielmo
Bernardo Ruiz
8:30 – 10:30 | LAWCHA Board Meeting
10:30- 12:00 | Narratives of Economic Crisis: What They Tell Us; Why They Matter
Chair/Commentator: Steve Fraser
“Panic-less Panic: The Strange Career of the Panic of 1837,” Jessica Lepler
“Four Horsemen of the Liberal Apocalypse: Moody, Freud, Chekhov, and Luxemburg describe the Panic of 1873,” Scott Nelson
“Narrating the ‘Great Recession’: Big Government, the Money Trust and the Politics of Economic Reform,” Alice O’Connor
10:30- 12:00 | A Right to Work? New Perspectives on Capitalism and the Construction of Disability
Moderator: Susan Levine
Nate Holdren
Audra Jennings
Lindsey Patterson
Sarah Rose
Bess Williamson
10:30- 12:00 | The Wide-Ranging Signi?cance of Gender: The In?uence of Alice Kessler-Harris’ Work through the Eyes of Her Students.
Moderator: Daniel Katz
“Transnational Histories and Transnational Networks,” Karen Balcom
“Intersections of Gender, Race, and Sexuality,” Jennifer Brier
“Social Policy and the Welfare State,” Beatrix Hoffman
“Class and Ethnicity,” Colleen O’Neill
“Writing History in Collaboration with the East African Indigenous Maasai,” Mary Poole
10:30- 12:00 | State of the Field: The Long Civil Rights Movement: Applications and New Directions
Chair: Adam Green
Commentator: Jacquelyn Hall
Mark Brilliant
Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Van Gosse
Anne M. Valk
1:30- 3:00 | Making Working-Class Women’s History.
Moderator: Priscilla Murolo
“Building an Archive: Working-Class Women’s Stories of Activism in the 1970s and 1980s,” Joey Fink
“Public Policy and Women in Non-Traditional Work,” Francine Moccio
“Building an Archive: Working-Class Women’s Stories of Activism in the 1970s and 1980s,” Jessica Wilkerson
“‘Wages, Not Welfare’: Low-Wage Women Workers, Union Radicalism, and Political Engagement, 1970s to 1980s,” Naomi R Williams
1:30- 3:00 | Organizing Workers in the New Jungle: Labor Activists and Scholars in Dialogue
Chair: Nancy MacLean
Kim Bobo
Janice Fine
Jennifer Klein
Andrea van den Heever
1:30- 3:00 | The California Gold Rush and the Chinese Question Revisited
Chair: Cindy Hahamovitch
Commentator: Moon-Ho Jung
“Chinese Gold Miners, The “Coolie Question,” and the Propaganda of History,” Mae M. Ngai
1:30- 3:00 | Workers, Citizens, and the Social Wage in the Era of Downsizing
Chair/Commentator: Christopher Phelps
“Reaganized in the 1980s: US Urban Public-Sector Job Losses in Global Perspective,” Jane Berger
“Let’s Make the Market Work for Us: Community-Bank Partnerships as an Alternative to State-Led Urban Renewal, 1975 – 1989,” Rebecca Marchiel
“From Private Support to Privatization: The Corporate Transformation of Higher Education and American Manufacturing,” Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
3:00 | Plenary Session: David Montgomery—Labor Historian, Activist, Teacher, Mentor
7:00 – 9:00 | Precollegiate Teaching Reception
Saturday, 4/21
8:30 – 10:00 | Laboring the Empire: Roundtable on Work, Culture, and the American Empire
Daniel Bender
Nan Enstad
Dorothy Fujita-Rony
Julie Greene
Jana K. Lipman
Kimberley Phillips
8:30 – 10:00 | Give Me a Home: Race, Industrial Paternalism, and the State in the Extractive and Agricultural West, 1917 – 1947
Chair: Susan Johnson
Commentator: Gunther Peck
“‘We Don’t Want Any Extravagance’: Paternalism, Working- Class Community, and Nature in Pacific Northwest Lumber Towns, 1917 – 1941,” Steven C. Beda
“‘Ask the Indian to do it’: Family, Ethnicity, and Industrial Paternalism in the Pacific Northwest, 1917 – 1931,” Ileen A. DeVault
“For Labor and Democracy: Migrant Farm Worker Camps in an Era of Social Reform, 1935 – 1947,” Verónica Martínez-Matsuda
10:30 – 12:00 | Immigrants in Metropolitan America since 1965
Chair/Commentator: Michael Katz
Commentator: Carl Abbott
“Latino Immigration and the Transformation of Race and Place in Metropolitan Atlanta,” Irene Browne
“Comparative Glimpses of the Metropolis Revised: Gwinnett County, GA; Irvine, CA; Greater Princeton, NJ; and Naperville, IL,” Michael Ebner
“The Metropolitan Diaspora: New Immigrants in Greater Boston,” Marilynn Johnson
“Latino Immigration and the Transformation of Race and Place in Metropolitan Atlanta,” Mary Odem
10:30 – 12:00 | The Transnational Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Chair/Commentator: Kevin Gaines
“King’s Unfinished Agenda: Union and Labor Rights for the Poor and Working Poor,” Michael Honey
“South Africa,” William Chafe
“Brazil,” John D. French
“Northern Ireland,” Brian Kelly
12:00 – 1:30 | LAWCHA Annual Membership Meeting and Luncheon
Location: MacArthur Room, Hilton Hotel
1:30 – 3:00 | The Crisis of the Public Sector and the Fight over Its Future: A Roundtable Discussion
Moderator: William P. Jones
Commentator: David Newby
Eileen Boris
Joshua B. Freeman
Roberta Lynch
1:30 – 3:00 | Laboring for Healthy Environments: Working-Class Responses to Environmental Inequalities in the Postwar Era
Chair: Carl Zimring
Commentator: James Longhurst
“Paychecks and Picnics: Union Support of and Opposition to Environmental Preservation in the 1960s,” Brittany Fremion
“Regulating Dust and Danger: The United States Congress and the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969,” Richard Fry
“The United Auto Workers, Urban Politics, and the Origins of Environmental Justice in Detroit, 1971 – 1976,” Brandon Ward
1:30 – 3:00 | Doing Labor History in Public: Recent Experiences with the Politics of Memory and Representation
Chair: Kimberley Phillips
“The Virden Epic in Theater and Memory: Labor Struggles and the Politics of Academic History,” Rosemary Feurer
“Boston Working Peoples’ Heritage: Doing Labor History in Public Spaces,” James Green
“King in Memphis: Whose Story and What Meaning?,” Michael Honey
“Landmarking Ludlow: Collaboration, Contestation and the Politics of Memory,” Elizabeth Jameson
“Chicago Labor Remembers Haymarket and the Origins of May Day,” Larry Spivack
Sunday, 4/22
8:30 – 10:00 | Roundtable: Religion, Democracy, and the Working Class in Capitalist America, Gilded Age to Present
Chair: Nick Salvatore
Commentator: Ken Fones-Wolf
Chris Cantwell
Maureen Fitzgerald
Janine Giordano Drake
John Hayes
Matthew Pehl
Jarod Roll
10:30 – 12:00 | Race and Class on the Roads and Rails: New Approaches to a Working-Class History of Mass Transportation
Chair/Commentator: Liesl Miller Orenic
“In the Driver’s Seat: Civil Rights, Black Power and Transit in Chicago, 1933 – 1970,” Erik Gellman
“All Power to the Black Bus Drivers: The Black Panther Party’s Brief Experiment with Organized Labor,” John Rosen
“It Was Nothing Short of War: Street Railways and Class Conflict in Early-Twentieth-Century Philadelphia,” James Wolnger
10:30 – 12:00 | Maritime Perspectives on Work, Class and Global Capitalism
Chair/Commentator: Daniel Vickers
Denver Brunsman
Leon Fink
Lisa Norling
Marcus Rediker
10:30 a.m. – 12:00 | The Context and Practice of the “Occupy” Movement [Room 203-C, FAC]
Chair: Linda Gordon, New York University
“The Wisconsin Struggle: Forerunner to Occupy?” Alexander Shashko, University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Narratives of Predators,” Alice O’Connor, University of California, Santa Barbara
“Occupy and Organized Labor,” Penelope Lewis, The Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, City University of New York
“Occupy and Women’s/Gender Issues,” Susan Dirr, Occupy Chicago Activist
“Occupy and Black Radical Politics,” Barbara Ransby, University of Illinois, Chicago
Commentator: Linda Gordon
1:30pm | Incorporating Labor History into Your Curriculum
Rosemary Feurer, Northern Illinois University
Andrew Kersten, University of Wisconsin–Green Bay
Nikki Mandell, University of Wisconsin–Whitewater
Randi Storch, State University of New York, Cortland
