Seminar sessions are held on Fridays from 3 – 5 pm at the Newberry, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois.
This seminar provides a forum for works in progress that explore the history of working class people, communities, and culture; class and state policy; unions and popular political movements; and other related topics. We are particularly interested in works that deal with gender, sexuality, race, migration, and the social history of work. Our focus has been on U.S. history, but we welcome papers on North America generally, and on transnational aspects of labor history.
If you are interesting in presenting during the 2013-14 seminar, please see the Call for Proposals for instructions. Submissions are due April 25, 2013.
The seminar’s co-sponsors are the history departments of DePaul University, Northern Illinois University, Northwestern University, Roosevelt University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago, the Department of History and Political Science at Purdue University Calumet, and LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas.
Rosemary Feurer, Northern Illinois University; Leon Fink, University of Illinois at Chicago; and Erik Gellman, Roosevelt University are the coordinators for the 2012-13 seminar.
To attend, please read our Registration Information.
To see a listing of past seminars, please select a year below:
Seminar Schedule
“Edge of Endurance: Mexican Migrant Workers and the Making of a North American Working Class, 1880-1945”
Josef Barton, Northwestern University
“‘Machines Work, Secretaries Think’: Sex Equality Law, the Comparable Worth Movement, and the Problem of Skill in Postwar Office Work”
Katherine Turk, University of Texas at Dallas
“The National War Labor Board of World War II: A Re-Interpretation”
Ron Schatz, Wesleyan University
“The Base of the Empire: Chicago’s Teamsters Local 743 and Montgomery Ward”
Liesl Orenic, Dominican University
“From the Hook to the Box: How Longshore Unions in the San Francisco Bay Area and Durban Survived the Container”
Peter Cole, Western Illinois University
“’This very troublesome business’: The Struggle for Control of Charleston’s Waterfront Workforce”
Michael Thompson, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
“A. Philip Randolph & the World: The Politics of Black Anticolonialism, Antifascism, & Anticommunism”
Eric Arnesen, George Washington University
“’A Precedent Worth Setting’: The U.S. Military and Humanitarian Operations”
Jana Lipman, Tulane University