Labor history

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Sep 8, 2020
22 min

From 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, 2020
39 min

The Workers' Bill

Here'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, 2020
66 min

On the Unemployed Councils and the Chicago Workers' Committee

The last chapter of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression is, I think, more interesting than the...

Aug 23, 2020
36 min

The radical dimensions of mass consciousness, part 2

Here's the sequel to this post, on my preference for anti-Gramscianism. It's from the last chapter of my Ph.D. thesis. I'm putting it on...

Aug 23, 2020
51 min

The radical dimensions of mass consciousness, part 1

I'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...

Aug 21, 2020
56 min

Homeless men in the Great Depression

Here's another over-long blog post. It's a chapter from my dissertation, on homeless men during the Great Depression. I'm not sure it's...

Jun 29, 2020
15 min

Laboring 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, 2020
2 min

Primary sources on Communists and the unemployed during the Great Depression

While writing my PhD dissertation a few years ago ("Down But Not Out: The Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression"), I...

Jun 13, 2020
6 min

Gender 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, 2018
4 min

Brief 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, 2018
3 min

Industrial unionism in the meatpacking industry

Here 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, 2016
5 min

The meatpacking industry; or, hell on earth

Here are some excerpts from a review article of a book I’m reading called Slaughterhouse (1997), by Gail Eisnitz: [....] The agony starts...

Aug 10, 2015
4 min

The making of the working class

I'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, 2014
14 min

U.S. labor history

Power-structures never want people to remember history, because knowledge empowers. Knowledge of how the oppressed have won victories, or...

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Wright's Writing