Labor History Commons^™

2025-03-04 Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes from March 4, 2025.

Anarcho-Syndicalism In The Negaunee Branch Of The Finnish Socialist Association, Michael P. Selwa

HS 390 Primary Research Papers

Socialism reached a prominence as a movement in the United States during the early 20th century. Fueled by the machinations of industrial capitalism and labor reform, many workers, immigrants, and other individuals would arrive to the precepts of socialism, a political movement avowing to shirk the constraints of capitalism on the proletariat. Specifically, the question of why and how labor unions should function in a socialist society was a central tenet of debate within the faction of the American Socialist Party. The central question of this article is to examine why anarcho-syndicalists argued against traditional socialist reformist arguments in the …

2025-03-00 Newsletter, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress newsletter from March of 2025.

2025-02-04 Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes from February 4, 2025.

Labor And Beet Sugar, A "Modern Commodity" In The United States Between 1890 And 1920, Melanie H. Zelle

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

The turn of the twentieth century saw a booming American beet sugar industry. For the first time beet sugar rivaled cane sugar in feeding growing domestic demand. Examined here are numerous factors considered significant in the sudden explosion of an industry which had previously failed to establish itself on the continent, including trade policy, monopolization, and advancements in industrial technology. However, in returning to contemporaneous primary literature on the subject, including grower’s manuals, histories of the plant, and economic analysis, I locate labor as a significant and often overlooked base of growth in the industry. Thus it was through innovations …

2025-01-08 Convocation Speech, Morehead State University. Office Of The Provost.

Staff Congress Records

Remarks given by Raj Parikh, Provost of Morehead State University, during the Spring Convocation to the campus community on January 8, 2025.

2025-01-03 Message From The President, Morehead State University. Office Of The President.

Staff Congress Records

A message sent by the Office of the President to the campus community on January 3, 2025, regarding the potential of inclement weather in the upcoming days and possible closure of campus.

Iii.A.2 Displacement & Barriers To Home Ownership, Kim Rostan, Bria Harper, Jim Neighbors, Mark Byrnes

Crafting Democratic Futures

This document explains how systemic racism and discriminatory policies from the Civil War & Reconstruction period through the 20th century prevented African Americans in Spartanburg from building wealth through land ownership and home equity. It details barriers such as Black Codes, sharecropping, convict leasing, exclusion from New Deal programs, discriminatory housing policies, and urban renewal projects that displaced Black neighborhoods without providing equitable opportunities for economic advancement.

“We Were Put Out Of Good Jobs”: Women Night Workers In New York And The Origins Of The Women’S Equal Opportunity League, R.B. Tiven

Publications and Research

In the 1910s, U.S. social reformers advocated for labor laws to protect women who worked in factories. The laws included bans on women working at night. In New York, a small contingent of night-working women who had lost their jobs objected. Arguing that the laws were paternalistic and harmful, they formed the Women’s Equal Opportunity League. The group opposed all single-sex laws and ultimately won repeal of New York’s night work ban for printers, elevator operators, and transit workers. Night work was the stage on which reformers’ ideas about the greater good conflicted with arguments for women’s autonomy. Whether and …

Silent Chains: Family And Religious Systems As Foundations Of Child Slavery And Labor In Ghana (1775-1956), Patricia Esi Quainoo

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

This study explores the often-overlooked role of children in slavery and forced labor in Ghana, emphasizing their exploitation in domestic service, agriculture, and other labor sectors. While existing scholarship often subsumes children within broader narratives of slavery, this research highlights their distinct experiences and their crucial role in sustaining Indigenous slavery. It argues that child slavery in Ghana was reinforced by familial practices such as the pawnship system, religious obligations like the trokosi system, and the reliance on family farms, where children served as producers and carriers of cocoa. Additionally, missionaries employed children as laborers in mission stations, schools, and …

Engines Of Division: The Trabant, Economic Lag, And Cultural Fragmentation In A Unified Germany, Maria Carolina Auerbach

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the Trabant, East Germany’s iconic yet inefficient automobile, as a critical lens through which to explore the enduring socio-economic and cultural disparities between East and West Germany in the aftermath of reunification. By tracing the Trabant’s trajectory from its inception within the GDR’s command economy to its rapid obsolescence in the face of Western market forces, this study reveals how the vehicle served as both a product and a symbol of East Germany’s industrial ethos, resilience, and identity. The Trabant, once a ubiquitous artifact of socialist life, embodied the constraints of a resource-scarce economy but also cultivated …

White Paper And Black Water: Environmental Control Of Labor In Appalachian Paper Mill Communities, Matthew C. Powell

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

In several small Appalachian communities, the West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company dominated the local landscape. The company stripped the mountainsides of spruce trees for pulpwood and used rivers for industrial processes and waste disposal. The small towns along these rivers and between these mountains relied on paper mills for employment. Corporate control over the natural environment, and water more specifically, was a necessary requirement for paper production, but also acted as a source of power over employees and their communities. When paper workers sought to organize, the company responded by leveraging their control over the environment against them to …

Plantation Matters: The Black Production Of Space In Southeastern Louisiana, 1830 To 1912, Noura Jabir

Pomona Senior Theses

Taking one Louisiana sugar plantation as a starting place, I demonstrate how African-descended laborers created life-sustaining spaces within/beyond the death-driving plantation complex during and after slavery.

Campesino World-Building: Stories Of Migration, Memory, And Care In The Tension Of The Colonial Frame, Chelsea Ríos Gómez

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Campesinos, often reduced to the label of “farmworkers”, are too often seen only through the lens of their labor within profit-driven systems. This thesis disrupts that limited narrative by illuminating the rich, expansive nature of vivencias campesinas, ways of being that transcend capitalist measures of value. These vivencias are lived, embodied experiences rooted in campesino lifeways, encompassing cultural, spiritual, and relational practices that nurture and sustain life.

My research is guided by four central questions: (1) In what ways have campesinos in pixley resisted exploitative labor systems, and how can this resistance be understood as a form of care labor? …

This Is A War: The 1977-78 Coal Strike And The Fracturing Of The Postwar Social Compact, Christian B. Rowe

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The 1977–78 coal strike was a landmark moment for the American labor movement. Despite holding out for 110 days with no pay or benefits through a historically severe winter, miners were unable to advance their demands and achieve a progressive contract. By invoking the Taft–Hartley Act to end the strike, Jimmy Carter destabilized the New Deal political coalition by enraging one of its core constituencies and placing the needs of the state over the needs of unionized industrial workers. The BCOA’s immovable position in negotiations was an early sign that the labor-management accord that had governed industrial relations since World …

Front Matter - Zamani 1, No. 2, Editors Note

Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies

The editors are pleased to present to you the second issue of Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies. Volume 1 Number 2 has a collection of research and forum articles as well as book reviews. There are four articles that builds from field research with different themes spanning from neolithic to the postcolonial periods. The themes include new neolithic dating; smallpox control in early colonial period in the former German East Africa (now Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi); evasion of colonial taxation; and the connection between land legislations and land conflicts among the peasant and pastoral communities. There are also …

New Chronology For Neolithic Cultures In The Lake Eyasi Basin, Northern Tanzania, Musa Said Mwitondi, Pastory Magayane Bushozi

Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies

There have been several studies on Neolithic Cultures in the Serengeti National. The recovered archaeological materials include domestic and wild fauna remains, potsherds and lithic artefacts, ochre, and stone enclosures, dating between 7200 and 4900 BP. In the East African Rift System (EARS), conventional ages for Neolithic Cultures are inferred from the most extensively researched Neolithic sites in Kenya, where the oldest Nderit ware, cattle and caprine in the Lake Turkana Basin, northern Kenya, date ca. 5200 BP. Studies on the Neolithic of EARS have been structured to fit into the migration or diffusion models that consider the spread of …

Smallpox Outbreaks And Immunization Policies In Tanzania From The Late Nineteenth Century To The First World War, Lorne Larson

Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies

An estimated 300 million people died globally from smallpox in the 20th century alone. There was very much a North/South divide in the existence of the disease in that period, with countries across South America, Africa and Asia recording the majority of cases. In 1966 the World Health Organization launched an intensive effort to finally eliminate the disease. The last known endemic case of smallpox was reported in Somalia in 1977, and that outbreak was promptly contained. In 1980 smallpox was declared eradicated – the only infectious disease affecting humans to achieve this distinction. This remains among the most notable …

'Evading The Tax Collector’: Native Responses To The Head Tax In Colonial Njombe, Tanzania, 1920-1960, Peter Chaula, Hezron Kangalawe

Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies

Tax collection was one of the core preoccupations of the colonial government in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and other colonies in the Africa that persisted even after independence. Direct taxation formed the basis of colonial taxation in Tanganyika. Head tax was a dominant form of direct taxation with its burden being borne primarily by Africans. This article uses the colonial Njombe District of Tanganyika to explore the responses of the African taxpayers to the head tax. The available data indicates that colonial head tax policies and practices in Njombe elicited varied responses from Africans with covert forms forming the mainstay of …

Revisiting African Religion As An Academic Discipline In Africa: History And Prospects, Ivan B. Kivinge

Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies

Three main religious traditions—indigenous African beliefs and practices (African religion), Christianity and Islam—have dominated everyday life of communities in Africa today. Scholarship on religion indicates that only African religion originated in Africa— Christianity and Islam are foreign religions. Many Africans today have been active Christians and Muslims, who are sometimes being misleadingly taught that African religion is demonic and forms of paganism. This article employs historical and philosophical approaches to show how the study of African religion has navigated through various historical currents and resultant implications on the way the current generation views it. In the end, the article proposes …