Working History

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 economy to the gig economy.

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 nineteenth century and beyond.

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.

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.

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 live there.

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.