Labor history

Sep 25, 20222 min read

A free copy of my book

Last summer I published the book version of my Ph.D. dissertation, bearing the ungainly title Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in...

Aug 9, 202213 min read

The myth of the "moderate" American

[This article was published at Compact magazine.] In the United States there exists today, and has existed since at least the 1950s, a...

Jul 29, 20228 min read

Organized labor and the crisis of democracy

[This article was published at CommonDreams.org.] We live in a time when it’s become a boring cliché to say that democracy is under...

Jun 10, 202122 min read

Introduction to my forthcoming book

If 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 min read

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, 202035 min read

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, 202054 min read

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, 202025 min read

The radical dimensions of mass consciousness, part 2

Here'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 min read

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...

Jun 29, 202015 min read

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, 20202 min read

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, 20206 min read

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, 20184 min read

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, 20183 min read

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, 20165 min read

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, 20154 min read

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, 201414 min read

U.S. labor history

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

Wright's Writing

Wright's Writing