AHA Session 336
Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5
Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5
Monday, January 6, 2025: 11:00 AM-12:30 PM
New York Ballroom East (Sheraton New York, Third Floor)
Chair:
Cindy Hahamovitch, University of Georgia
Papers:
Comment:
Lori A. Flores, Stony Brook University, State University of New York
Session Abstract
This panel explores race, labor, and empire and the efforts of workers to organize. Examining worker’s voices within a global, national, and transnational labor history offers a holistic narrative of their struggles and union organizing. Jennifer Mill examines the pivotal roles of African American labor leaders Isaac Meyers and Frank Farrell connecting the concerns of the labor and civil rights movements from the Reconstruction Era, particularly in Virginia and North Carolina where labor organizing was most difficult. Rudi Batzell offers a comparative history of American and British union formation and racial boundary making in the late nineteenth century. He argues that the US South and Ireland were comparable rural, near-peripheries that supplied low-wage migrant labor and strikebreakers to the industrial cores of the US and the UK. Moving to the post-war era, Jessica Martinez places Chicana and Mexicana garment workers in a larger transnational historical context to explore how they shaped the El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez garment industry. Collectively these papers explore the interconnections among race, labor, and the expansion of the United States as a continental empire, and underline the importance of placing workers and their struggles to organize at the center of our understanding of historical change in the United States.
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