Jun 10, 202122 minIntroduction to my forthcoming bookIf all goes well, I'll be publishing a book sometime in the not-too-distant future. It'll be called something like Popular Radicalism and...
Sep 8, 202022 minFrom Steve Fraser's "The Age of Acquiescence"I just finished reading Steve Fraser's masterful The Age of Acquiescence (2014), which compares the popular responses to America's two...
Sep 4, 202035 minThe Workers' BillHere's the last section of chapter 6 of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Depression. The previous two sections are...
Sep 3, 202054 minOn the Unemployed Councils and the Chicago Workers' CommitteeThe last chapter of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression is, I think, more interesting than the...
Aug 23, 202025 minThe radical dimensions of mass consciousness, part 2Here's the sequel to this post, from the last chapter of my Ph.D. thesis. It's just an excerpt. The main point of it is to argue against...
Aug 23, 202045 minThe radical dimensions of mass consciousness, part 1I'm kind of a "vulgar Marxist." In this respect, I suppose I'm a lot like people in the American ruling class, except that their values...
Jun 29, 202015 minLaboring Against Racism: The Textile Workers Union of America in the South during the 1960s[An old student paper.] The conventional understanding of labor unions and their membership in the 1960s is of a conservative and...
Jun 16, 20202 minPrimary sources on Communists and the unemployed during the Great DepressionWhile writing my PhD dissertation a few years ago ("Down But Not Out: The Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression"), I...
Jun 13, 20206 minGender norms in a Chilean copper mine[This was supposed to be a short outline for a student presentation I had to give. So excuse the roughness. Here are more book reviews.]...
Dec 9, 20184 minBrief notes on a classic historical work[Old notes on David Montgomery’s great book Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free...
Jul 27, 20183 minIndustrial unionism in the meatpacking industryHere are old notes of mine on a very good book by the historian Roger Horowitz, “Negro and White, Unite and Fight!”: A Social History of...
Jul 22, 20165 minThe meatpacking industry; or, hell on earthHere are some excerpts from a review article of a book I’m reading called Slaughterhouse (1997), by Gail Eisnitz: [....] The agony starts...
Aug 10, 20154 minThe making of the working classI'm finally reading [in 2011] E. P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Query: why was England so...
Sep 22, 201414 minU.S. labor historyPower-structures never want people to remember history, because knowledge empowers. Knowledge of how the oppressed have won victories, or...