Labor History Commons^™

Children At Work, Parental Rights—And Rhetoric, Naomi Cahn, Maxine Eichner, Mary Ziegler

Arkansas Law Review

States are increasingly considering and enacting laws that reduce protections for child laborers, and the number of minors who have been employed in violation of existing child labor laws has been steadily growing. We argue that politicians deploy the rhetoric of parental rights in today’s legislative battles over child labor protections to create political cover for reforms that benefit businesses, not children or their families. Part I demonstrates that appeals to parental rights have a long history in child labor law. Through much of the battle to regulate children’s labor, child-labor opponents insisted that regulations infringed parents’ legitimate rights over …

A Dream Deferred: Communism, Secession, And The Decline Of Hardrock Unionism, Dominic Alexander Treadwell

History ETDs

This thesis examines how the changing conditions after World War II impacted organized labor, focusing on secession movements within the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Secessions in Connecticut and Alabama and the differing responses by the CIO Executive Board highlight how external pressures from postwar dynamics and increasing anticommunism undermined the left-liberal alliance in the Congress of Industrial Organizations. World War II increased labor’s reliance on government mediation, reducing the effectiveness of militant strategies. Following the war, assertive capital, restrictive labor legislation, the Cold War, and the rise in anti-Communism exacerbated tensions in the CIO, leading to …

2024-07-09 Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes from July 9, 2024.

À Propos Decolonization: The “Affaire D’Amour” Between The Renault Factory Strikes Of 1947 And French Malagasy Discrimination, Grace E. Wurzer

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

In 1947, The Monnet Plan was introduced in France to reinvigorate the economy, which was still feeble after World War II. Its high demands of factory workers soon led to strikes, which quickly gained the support of the French Communist Party. Concurrently, the French government was rapidly decolonizing Madagascar. Newly independent Africans found themselves financially strained in the wake of decolonization and were enticed to immigrate to France in the hopes of attaining economic freedom and citizenship in exchange for labor. These laborers, who were employed by the stricken factories, also garnered the support of the PCF, much to the …

Land, Labor, And The Railroad In Industrial Appalachia: How The Baltimore And Ohio Railroad Engineered Space, 1843-1872, Lillian R. K. M. Austin

Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal

During the nineteenth century, the Baltimore and Ohio railroad reshaped the social, political, and physical environment of the mid-Atlantic around the needs of the industrial economy. The creation of industrial space, and the proliferation of communities to populate it, is seen retrospectively as an inevitable consequence of technological innovation, but engaging with contemporary corporate records reveals that this space, like the railroad, was engineered. In order to design a supply chain that would make industrialization economical, the railroad and coal industries engaged in political and social engineering to design the new locales of industrialism, exemplified in the Allegheny Mountains by …

Howat, Alexander, Collection, 1921-2011, Brent Mcdowell

Finding Aids

This collection contains materials concerning Alexander Howat and his life, but more specifically his role as the president of the United Mine Workers of America union, District 14 in Southeast Kansas.

Italian Mutual Aid Society Of West Mineral Collection, Brent Mcdowell

Finding Aids

The Italian Mutual Aid Society, Carl Marx Chapter was created by Italian miners in West Mineral to serve as a social and mutual aid society starting in 1906 according to the society’s ledger. This society helped hurt miners and their families, as well as families of miners killed while working in Southeast Kansas mines. Groups like these would go on to become unions, the members being important in negotiations with mine owners for better working conditions and benefits such as pay or money that went to the injured or the families of those killed in the mines. Examples from this …

Transatlantic Connections: Reconsidering The Outcomes Of The Arts And Crafts Movement Through The Women's Experience, Britain And The United States, 1860-1920, Tiffany B. Beasley

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

The British Arts and Crafts movement (1860-1914) was a call for the return to artisan craftsmanship as a response to mass-production driven by the Industrial Revolution (1760-1830). Historically, the movement has been viewed as a socialist concept developed by men. However, in 1979, a feminist intervention in women's history challenged this masculinist perspective. As the movement spread to the United States (1870-1920), first to New England and then to the South in New Orleans, it also expanded into concepts that moved beyond craftsmanship and into women's issues, such as education, suffrage, and professional work opportunities. It is now evident that …

2024-07-00 Newsletter, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress newsletter from June of 2024.

2024-06-20 Message From The President, Morehead State University. Office Of The President.

Staff Congress Records

Message sent on June 20, 2024 by the President to the campus community regarding upcoming dates of importance, additional paid days off, congratulatory recognitions, and highlights from the recent Board of Regents meeting.

2024-06-06 Message From The President, Morehead State University. Office Of The President.

Staff Congress Records

Message sent by the President to the campus community regarding upcoming dates of importance, additional paid day off, congratulatory recognitions, personnel updates, and summer camps on June 6, 2024.

2024-06-04 Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes from June 4, 2024.

The Migration Of South Asians From India To Guyana: The Journey, Struggles In A New Land, Reasons For Changes Over Time And Their Cultivation Of A New Culture., Cynthia C. Harry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Indians from different regions of India arrived in Guyana through indentureship in 1838. They were under a five-year contract and had to work on the sugar plantations for the duration of their indentureship. While they tried to persist their Indian culture, assimilation in their new environments and interaction with people of different cultures, allowed them to develop a culture unique to Indo Guyanese heritage.

This thesis focuses on the history of Indian diaspora in Guyana. It evokes the struggles they faced on the ships, and during and after indentureship. It also touches on the political and racial issues they had …

Class And Class Consciousness According To E. P. Thompson, Daniel Cunningham

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this article, I extract a theory of class from E. P. Thompson’s historical works of the 1960s and 1970s, focusing especially on his 1963 magnum opus The Making of the English Working Class, the articles later collected in the 1991 volume Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture, and the essays “The Peculiarities of the English” and “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?” In the first section, I argue, following Ellen Meiksins Wood, that Thompson developed a genuinely historical materialist theory of class formation as a “structured process” that moves from class struggle to class …

2024-06-00 Newsletter, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress newsletter from June of 2024.

The Pursuit Of Productivity: A Marxist Analysis Of How Frederick Winslow Taylor And Dr. W. Irving Clark Revolutionized The American Factory During The Early Twentieth Century, Stephen Hood

University Honors Theses

In 1911, two events occurred that laid the framework for a revolution in factory management; Frederick Winslow Taylor published his famous work The Principles of Scientific Management; and The Norton Emery Company hired W. Irving Clark to open a first-of-its-kind medical facility. Clark's work should be understood as an extension of the scientific management that Taylor championed during the turn of the twentieth century. The factory served as a laboratory for men like Clark and Taylor to create new methods for increasing productivity while attempting to overcome contradictions inherent to the capitalist mode of production. By utilizing the work …

Writing Black Women And Native Americans Back Into The Slavery Narrative, Corinne Kreeger

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

The field of history is constantly in flux as academics re-examine questions and conclusions from the past through contemporary perspectives. This establishes a dynamic dialogue between past historical interpretations and current ideas, allowing analysis to provide a foundation to build new theories and explanations. Ira Berlin’s work on American chattel slavery has proven to be one such building block. Before Berlin's work, historians often generalized slavery across the colonies and throughout history using Virginia's large tobacco or cotton plantations as a model. However, these plantations were a later development in North America, and focusing exclusively on that model inaccurately portrayed …

The World After: Central Virginia In The Wake Of The Civil War, Harry Caldwell

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This thesis examines the situation in Central Virginia following the surrender of Appomattox. Its primary focus is on the Federal Provost Guard who were sent back into the region in the month following the Surrender. It begins in March 1865, introducing the world that the Provost will be thrown into that summer, and it will go month to month until January 1866, when the Provost have fully departed from the region and power was fully turned over to civilian authorities. This research is primarily built of the General Orders that were printed in the Lynchburg newspaper, The Daily Virginian, …

Iron In The New World’S Veins: Government, Ironworks, And Community In The Massachusetts Bay Colony, Abigail Adam

Masters Theses, 2020-current

The Massachusetts Bay Company conceived of a colonial iron industry as early as 1628; two years before its leaders migrated to the New World. The colony’s founders continued their efforts to establish a functioning iron industry in subsequent decades. With the General Court’s support, John Winthrop Jr. engaged in business with the London-based Company of Undertakers to make the iron industry a reality. Nevertheless, previous scholarship has neglected the iron industry’s place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s establishment. Yet surviving court records and correspondence indicates that these two bodies are inseparable. Indeed, the General Court used the ironworks to materially …

2024-05-07 Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes from May 7, 2024.