Working History
by Working History
Working History spotlights the work of leading labor historians, activists, and practitioners focusing especially on the U.S. and global Souths, to inform public debate and dialogue about current labor, economic, and political issues with the benefit of historical context.
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Episodes
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Working History, Past and Future
US history has always been contested. The work of historians is to constantly challenge and revise existing historical interpretations using new methods, source materials, and analytical frameworks. The past two years have been different though: historical understanding, and often the…
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Ghosts of World War II: Recovering Korean Forced Laborers
Mae Ngai sits down with historians Ágota Duró ( Hiroshima Jogakuin University) and David Palmer ( University of Melbourne, Australia) to discuss the history of Korean forced labor in Japan during World War II, and the ongoing grassroots movement uncover and expose this tragic history through the...
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ICE and Resistance in the Twin Cities
David Stein sits down with historians Will Jones (Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) and Peter Rachleff (Retired Professor at Macalester College and Co-Executive Director of the East Side Freedom Library) to discuss ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in the…
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The Business of Being Dolly
Dolly Parton: renowned country star, successful businesswoman, celebrated philanthropist... leftist? Not so fast. In this week’s episode Yami Rodriguez and Justin Randolph sit down with historian Amanda Marie Martínez (UNC, Chapel Hill), to discuss Parton’s legacy in the wake of her recent death...
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The Women of Mexico's Railroads
When we think about the history of railroad labor, we often think of engineers, sleeping car porters, or the workers who constructed the railroads themselves. But what about the cooks, nurses, and laundresses who kept the railroads running? In this episode, Abosede George sits down with Kate…
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Back to School
School may have returned for the fall, but what are the challenges facing teachers unions and their members as we approach the midway point of Trump 2.0? In this week's episode of Working History, Joan Flores-Villalobos met with UTLA member Jake Roth, labor organizer Katie Miles from UC Berkeley,...
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The Handoff
It's official, "Working History" is back! In our first episode back, Beth English—the founder, host, and producer of "Working History" vol 1—interviews Sarah McNamara, president of the Southern Labor Studies Association (SLSA), Eileen Boris, president of the Labor and Working-Class History...
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Working History Reboot Promo
After several long years off the air, the beloved labor history podcast is back! Now brought to you by the Southern Labor Studies Association, the Labor and Working-Class History Association, LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History, and International Labor and Working-Class History. New episodes...
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Fall for Liberation with Maria Harmon
Step Up Louisiana co-founder and co-director Maria Harmon joins the podcast to talk about the group’s Freedom Summer-inspired voter turnout campaigns and grassroots mobilization efforts in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Jefferson Parish, New Orleans’ proposed Workers Bill of Rights, and the future...
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Organizing Faculty in Florida with Paul Ortiz
Dr. Paul Ortiz, a professor of labor history at Cornell’s ILR School, joins co-host Olivia Paschal to discuss the history of higher education labor organizing in Florida, the resurgence of right-wing and austerity politics in public universities, and Dr. Ortiz’s work in higher education labor...
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The Present and Future of Southern Labor: The UAW’s Historic Win at Volkswagen
Earlier this year, workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted to join the UAW in a landslide. The Southern Labor Studies Association held our biannual meeting at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga last week, just as UAW Local 42 began negotiating its first contract....
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Beyond Norma Rae
Welcome to a new season of Working History! Series co-host Dave Anderson talks with Aimee Loiselle about her book Beyond Norma Rae: How Puerto Rican and Southern White Women Fought for a Place in the American Working Class
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Southern Exposure at 50: Sue Thrasher, Bob Hall, and Leah Wise
This week’s episode features a panel recorded live at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of Southern Exposure magazine, held in March at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library. The panel, which reflects on the founding of the Institute for Southern Studies and the…
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Resident Strangers: Immigrant Laborers in New South Alabama
Jennifer Brooks, Professor of History at Auburn University, discusses her book Resident Strangers: Immigrant Laborers in New South Alabama, beginning with the book's origin story and then explaining the significance of Chinese and European immigrants in the New South and their interactions with...
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Working in the Magic City: Moral Economy in Early Twentieth-Century Miami
Thomas Castillo discusses his book Working in the Magic City: Moral Economy in Early Twentieth-Century Miami, beginning with the book’s origin story, and then tracing Miami's working-class history from World War I to the mid-1930s.
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Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power
Jefferson Cowie discusses his book Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, beginning with the book’s origin story, and then tracing the use of "freedom" to dominate others in Barbour County, Alabama, from Indian Removal in the 1830s through the Civil Rights Movement in…
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Labor Journalism, Farmworkers, and Reynolds Tobacco with Victoria Bouloubasis
Journalist Victoria Bouloubasis discusses her career reporting on agricultural and food labor in North Carolina, her approach to labor journalism, and how she uses histories in her work. Show Notes: "A North Carolina Farmworker Was Accused of Abusing His Workers. Then Big Tobacco Backed His...
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Citizen and Other: Puerto Rican Farmworkers in the United States
Ismael García Colón discusses his new book, Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire, Puerto Rican migrant farmworkers, and their labor experiences in the post-World War II United States.
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Labor, Capital, and Politics in the Industrial South
Michael Goldfield discusses his new book, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s, union organization in the South's leading industrial sectors, and how contests between labor and capital in the New Deal-era South continue to shape American politics today.
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Race, Class, and Communism in the Jim Crow South
Mary Stanton discusses her book, Red, Black, White: The Alabama Communist Party, 1930-1950, New Deal-era political activism, and movements for racial, economic, and social justice in the Jim Crow South.
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Politics of the Pantry
Emily E. LB. Twarog discusses her book, POLITICS OF THE PANTRY, the consumer activism of American housewives, and food's central role in consumer politics in the twentieth-century United States.
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Southern Sisters and Social Justice in the Jim Crow South
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall discusses her new book, SISTERS AND REBELS: A STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE SOUTH, the southern upbringing of Grace and Katharine Lumpkin, their social activism, and contributions to the overlapping labor, feminist, and civil rights ferment in the pre-World War II South.
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Making the Woman Worker
Eileen Boris discusses her new book MAKING THE WOMAN WORKER: PRECARIOUS LABOR AND THE FIGHT FOR GLOBAL STANDARDS, the history of the ILO's labor protections for women, domestic and home workers in the Global North and Global South, and ongoing fights to recognize precarious labor from the care...
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Race, Slavery, and Psychiatry
Dr. Wendy Gonaver discusses her book, "The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880," the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Virginia, and the roles that race, the institution of slavery, and slave labor played in the development of psychiatric diagnosis and care through the...
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Reconciling a Slaveholding Past
Jody Allen, Assistant Professor of History at the College of William and Mary and Director of The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation, discusses William and Mary's slaveholding past and the genesis, research, and ongoing community outreach of The Lemon Project.
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Beef: Exploitation, Innovation, and How Meat Changed America
Joshua Specht discusses his new book, RED MEAT REPUBLIC, and how the history of beef production tells the story of broad changes in the American economy, society and political landscape during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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Appalachia: A Regional Reckoning
Anthony Harkins (Western Kentucky University) and Meredith McCarroll (Bowdin College) discuss their edited volume, APPALACHIAN RECKONING: A REGION RESPONDS TO HILLBILLY ELEGY, the complexities of the region known as Appalachia, and challenging popular stereotypes of the region and the people who...
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”You Can’t Eat Coal”: Women’s Social Justice Activism in Appalachia
Jessica Wilkerson, Assistant Professor of History and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, discusses her book, "To Live Here You Have to Fight," and the recent history of feminist social justice activism in Appalachia.
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Novelist Wiley Cash on “The Last Ballad” and the Loray Mill Strike
Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Wiley Cash discusses his novel, "The Last Ballad," writing fiction inspired by the South, and exploring the complexities of southern class, race, and gender relations against the backdrop of the 1929 Loray Mill strike.
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Reconsidering Southern Labor History
Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt discuss their new edited volume, Reconsidering Southern Labor History, the nexus of race, class and power in the history of labor in the South, and how a new generation of southern labor scholars are changing our understanding of labor's past, present and…
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Slavery and Memory
Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle, Professors of History at California State University—Fresno, discuss their co-authored book, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy, competing narratives about slavery in the South, and the fraught history of race, memory and...
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Revisioning the American Past though African American and Latinx History
Paul Ortiz, Associate Professor and Director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida, discusses his most recent book, An African American and Latinx History of the United States, the myth of American exceptionalism, and globalizing America's past.
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Shaping a New Conservatism in the South
Katherine Rye Jewell, Assistant Professor of History at Fitchburg State University, discusses her book, Dollars for Dixie, and the evolution of political and economic conservatism in the twentieth-century South.
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Murder, Race and (In)Justice
Karen Cox, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, discusses her new book, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, and what one murder case in 1930s Mississippi reveals about race relations, criminal justice, and life in the Jim Crow South.
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”Hillbilly Hellraisers” and Rethinking the Roots of Populist Politics
J. Blake Perkins, assistant professor of history at Williams Baptist College, discusses his new book, Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks, regional relations with the federal government, and the evolution of grassroots politics.
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Poor Whites in the Slave South
Keri Leigh Merritt discusses her book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, and intersections of race, class, politics, and slavery in the pre-Civil War South.
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The High Cost of Cheap Food
Bryant Simon, Professor of History at Temple University, discusses his new book, The Hamlet Fire: A Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives, and the tragic consequences of the ethos of "cheap" for workers, communities, and the nation.
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A New Narrative for Labor in the 1970s (Labor Day Episode 2017)
Lane Windham, Associate Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, discusses her book, Knocking on Labor’s Door, and why the 1970s should be seen as more than a moment of decline for the U.S. labor movement.
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Preserving Southern Labor’s Past
Traci JoLeigh Drummond, archivist for the Southern Labor Archives at Georgia State University in Atlanta, discusses the preservation of materials related to southern labor history, new collections open to researchers, digital access to archival sources, and what makes a collection of records...
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LGBT Discrimination and Activism in the Southern Workplace
Joshua Hollands, of the Institute of the Americas at University College London, discusses his award-winning essay, “There’s a Bigot in Your Biscuit’: Workplace Discrimination at Cracker Barrel, Civil Rights, and Corporate Activism in the Southern United States,” and the past and present of LGBT...
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Southern Small Farmers Standing Their Ground
Professor Adrienne Petty discusses her book, Standing Their Ground: Small Farmers in North Carolina Since the Civil War, the black and white farmers in the South who were part of the "small farming class," and their evolving strategies for holding onto their land through the nineteenth and...
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Freedom Struggles in the Post-Civil Rights Rural South
Professor Greta de Jong of the University of Nevada, Reno, discusses her book, You Can't Eat Freedom, rural organizing, social justice movements, and the connected histories of the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty in the US South.
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From Indentured Servant to Modern-Day Guestworker
Professor Cindy Hahamovitch of the University of Georgia discusses her research connecting the global histories of 19th-century indentured servants and today's guestworkers.
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The Long History of Mexican Migration to the Deep South
Professor Julie Weise of the University of Oregon discusses her book, Corazón de Dixie, the long history of Mexican migration to states in the Deep South, and the roots of anti-immigrant politics and policies in the region today.
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Race, Identity, and Memory
Professor Blain Roberts of California State University, Fresno, talks about intersections of race, identity, and memory in the South in a wide-ranging discussion that starts in the segregated beauty parlors of the Jim Crow era and ends with remembrances of slavery in modern-day Charleston, South...
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What Does ”Working Class” Mean in American Politics?
Professor Robyn Muncy of the University of Maryland discusses the history of the term "working class" and its uses in American politics from the 1930s to today.
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Migrant Workers and Labor Relations from South Texas to the Nation
John Weber, Assistant Professor of History at Old Dominion University, discusses his book, "From South Texas to the Nation," migrant agricultural labor, immigration policy, and the long-term impacts of the labor relations model that developed in South Texas during the early twentieth century.
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Social Justice from the U.S. South to South Africa
Alex Lichtenstein, Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, discusses his new book with co-author Rick Halpern, "Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid," photojournalism, and writing transnational histories of labor and social justice movements.
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Academic Publishing in the Digital Age
Derek Krissoff, Director of the West Virginia University Press, discusses academic publishing and university presses, the open access movement, and current trends in history publishing.
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Justice for a Toxic Town
Professor Ellen Griffith Spears of the University of Alabama, author of "Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town," discusses the decades long struggle for environmental and civil rights justice in Anniston, Alabama, and broader lessons to be learned from this fight…
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About this show
Working History spotlights the work of leading labor historians, activists, and practitioners focusing especially on the U.S. and global Souths, to inform public debate and dialogue about current labor, economic, and political issues with the benefit of historical context.
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Working History