Labor History Commons^™

The Implications Of Waste Streams At Camp Au Train, Timothy J. Maze

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Archaeological remains from Camp Au Train provide an opportunity to understand sanitation methods during its use as a Civilian Conservation Corps camp and later used to house German Prisoners of War during World War II. Seven refuse features from this camp were excavated and their contents linked to functional locations within the camp in order to reconstruct waste streams across the site and to observe how military aspects of sanitation were implemented by an organization infamous for its emphasis on cleanliness, order, and hygiene. While the importance of sanitation is often mentioned by historians and archaeologists in research of these …

Moving Narration: A Journey Through History, Yincheng Zhu

Masters Theses

The Central Pacific, as the first transcontinental railroad, is a remarkable achievement in the history of the United States. However, the story of what happened during its construction, including the struggles of the first generation of immigrants from China who built the tracks, and the resistance of native Americans to cede their lands, is largely forgotten. The California Zephyr, as a long-trip train that currently runs on the Central Pacific tracks, is not only a means of transportation but should also tell the history of survival and resistance embodied by the landscape it moves through and tracks it travels over. …

Liquid Border, Yingfan Jia

Masters Theses

A River is a mighty and constantly-evolving force, leaving behind an intricately designed and constantly changing system. Not just a river, the Rio Grande stretches all the way from Colorado before intersecting with the US-Mexico Border in southern Texas - a point where the powerful forces of nature now merge with a clearly-defined political boundary. The outcome of this is a unique ecological niche, which may often go unnoticed despite its distinctiveness.

Texas is famous for its farms and ranches, and the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas was once an agricultural hub. However, urbanization and the depletion of water …

Republican Party Doctrine And The West Virginia Coal Mine Wars, Thomas Kidd

Masters Theses, 2020-current

The West Virginia Coal Mine Wars of 1912-1913 and 1920-1921 are most strongly associated with the use of government and military force against organized labor. A deeper examination of the contemporary newspapers in the state, associated with the Republican Party reveals the attitudes of the party toward labor. Looking at how these editors reacted to the key events of the mine wars reveals that the Republican Party of the time supported two principles: free enterprise and rule of law. This study shows how the importance of these key principles caused the editors loyal to the party to shift the blame …

The Language Of Legal Violence: The State’S Role In Silencing Capitalist Dissent, 1877-1915, Jaclene Paolucci

Theses and Dissertations

From the 1870s to the eve of World War I, the United States government enacted a violent and repressive campaign against labor activists and political radicals to protect capitalist interests. The growing alliance between employers and the government threatened American democratic traditions and turned those who challenged the capitalist system into potential enemies of the state.

U.S History: The Constant Reliance On Immigrant Labor From Asian Immigrants In The 19th And Early 20th Century To Mexican Immigrants In The Bracero Program, Moises Gonzalez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

During the late 19th and early 20th century, as the United States implemented stricter immigration laws, there was a gradual shift from Asian migrant labor to Mexican migrant Labor. The Bracero Program, which was established in 1942 at the request of U.S agribusinesses, best exemplified this development in the U.S. Throughout the duration of this guest work program, it demonstrated the discriminatory and exploitative nature of U.S agribusinesses. Yet, few studies have emphasized the thoughts of former braceros. Therefore, this proposed thesis will shed light on a more positive outlook of the Bracero Program where former braceros would persevere through …

Radical Routes: The Formation Of The Boston School Bus Drivers Union Local 8751, Maci Mark

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis is both a history and an examination of the formation of the Boston School Bus Drivers Union, situating their formation in both the labor movement of the 1970s and desegregation. Thrown into the midst of the storm of desegregation the drivers are set up for failure by the Boston School Committee. Forced to unionize due to unsafe working conditions and pay cuts, the unique make-up of the drivers allow for the success. Filled with community organizers, feminists, anti-war protestors, anti-racists, members of the LGBTQ+ community, leftists, and socialists, they use new tactics, willing to challenge established union leadership …

Re-Curation And Recognition: Addressing The Curation Crisis Through The Garnet Ghost Town, Jocelyn A. Palombo

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

As universities, federal curation facilities, public museums, and private collections struggle to create space on their shelves curators and archaeologists continuously evaluate what must continue to be stored and what needs to be deaccessioned. Utilizing a collection housed at the University of Montana I explore strategies for combating this issue. The collection originates from the Garnet Ghost Town and has been in the university’s care since its excavation. The objectives of this project are to obtain new information and incorporate innovative techniques to learn more about the collection itself and provide an updated analysis to one of Montana’s most complete …

Merino Wool In America: Migration, Economic Desire And Patriotism, Una R. Winn

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts and The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Northeastern Pennsylvania's Forgotten Labor Massacre: Analysis Pf The English Language Record Of The Lattimer Massacre, Jamie C. Costello

Graduate Masters Theses

The Lattimer Massacre occurred on September 10, 1897, in a small anthracite mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania. The bloody conflict erupted when an unarmed group of mostly Eastern European immigrant mine workers lethally clashed with militantly armed sheriff’s deputies who acted on behalf of private coal companies. Nineteen strikers died at the scene and dozens more were horrifically wounded. Despite the outraged shock of the community clamoring for justice which led to a murder trial that made international headlines, the Lattimer Massacre faded from local and national memory in the following decades. A combination of lingering nativist prejudice curated by …

Militant Maids: Domestic Workers’ Participation In Bus Boycotts, Voter Registration, And Head Start Programs In The Deep South, Brittany Ann Carey

Master's Theses

This thesis examines the participation of domestic workers in the Civil Rights Movement, specifically in Gulf South bus boycotts in Baton Rouge, Montgomery, and Tallahassee; voter registration efforts in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida; and Head Start work in those same Deep South states. Domestic workers engaged in activism by joining unions, women's movements, and the Communist Party to improve their treatment in Northern and Southern cities. Modern historians have expanded their research to explore the participation of domestic workers in the Civil Rights Movement, especially in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In some cases, researchers also have explored the complicated …

The City With A Bathtub Ring: A Century Of Shared Industrial Identity In Belfast, Maine, Michael Munson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Belfast, Maine, is a small, visitor-friendly city of approximately 6,700 residents located on that state’s picturesque mid-coast. Founded by Ulster Scots descendants in 1770, Belfast’s rich history has allowed its sense of place to evolve as the community’s identity changed from a frontier settlement to a commercial seaport, then an industrial city, and currently a host city for several prominent customer call centers. While now charming, increasingly gentrified and popular with tourists, the city earlier prospered for more than a century as a blue-collar industrial community, which eschewed tourism well into the 1980s. This paper addresses Belfast’s sense of place …

Her World Changed: Anna Louise Strong And The 1916 Everett Massacre, Charlotte Nabors

History Theses

The 1970s saw a resurgence in the scholarship on Anna Louise Strong’s life, especially in feminist circles. In general, historians pre-1970 doubted the authenticity of Strong’s political radicalism and criticized the inconsistency in her participation. Neis’ scholarship represents the largely uncritical second-wave feminist interest in Strong’s life following her death in 1970. The scholarship on Strong’s life falls into three categories: the old guard, the feminist renaissance, and twenty-first-century perspectives. Since 2000, a more nuanced interpretation of Strong’s life incorporated elements of the old guard and feminist discussions. Anna Louise Strong’s introduction to activism began in her childhood as the …

Coal, Land, And Ideology: Inventions Of Appalachia In The Mind Of The American Ruling Class, Zachary Harris

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Appalachia, itself a difficult to resolutely define region, has undergone the economic forces of colonialism and industrializing capitalism which allow for an excellent case study to apply Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony. No American region’s national conception is likely to have been as varied and often misrepresented as that of Appalachia. From the Revolutionary American State’s invention of early white settlers as the virtuous yeoman of the Republic to the modern perception of Appalachia as backwards, conservative, and drug-addled, shifting national economic conditions resulted in a constant invention of Appalachia in congruence. Whenever the people residing in Appalachia, whether Black, …

Black Hillbilly: An Exploration Of The Black Erasure From The Appalachian Historical Narrative, Suzanne S A Blunk

Master of Arts in Humanities | Master's Theses 1936 - 2022

In 1915 two Black businessmen, Archie McKinney and Matthew Buster, secured the purchase and operation of Eagle Coal Company Inc. in Montgomery, West Virginia. A Black-owned coal company operated and existed in southwestern West Virginia. Eagle Coal has all but disappeared, even from historical memory. What exactly happened to this coal company remains very much a mystery and is a poignant image that represents the mystery that surrounds the Black experience in Appalachia. In the face of “social injustice, racial violence, disfranchisement, and the intensification of the segregationist system,” Black Americans set out from the South in search of better …

Building Home In Diaspora: New York’S Jewish Left And The History Of The Bronx Housing Cooperatives, Micah Benjamin Wilson

Honors Projects

This thesis investigates three predominantly Jewish housing cooperatives that emerged in the Bronx in the late 1920s. The Amalgamated Housing Cooperative, the United Workers Cooperative Colony (the “Coops”), and the Sholem Aleichem Houses offered garment workers utopian retreats from the drudgery of Lower East Side tenements where Jewish immigrants arrived in droves between 1890-1920. With each cooperative housing a distinct faction of the Jewish Left––from socialists to communists to Yiddish nationalists––the Bronx housing cooperatives, more than experiments in communal living, were the site of a highly contested battle over competing Jewish cultural and political worldviews across the 1930s and 1940s. …

The Unknown Terror: Credit Card Debt Among The American Middle Class, Eamonn Maher

Theses

This Capstone focuses on a true crisis that affects many middle class Americans. Credit card debt has become a norm for American society and quietly has terrorized and dismantled the lives of many middle class Americans. From the rolling back of usury laws protecting predatorial interest rates, to many Americans losing jobs and income. This paper discusses the relationship between the reliance on credit cards and crippling debt for many Americans in the middle class.

The Vanishing Frontier: Economic And Social Change In Western North Carolina, 1945-1970, Elisabeth Avery Moore

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This dissertation works to integrate the growth of regional tourism into the existing historiography of economic development in Appalachia and the postwar American South. Regional leaders introduced an economic transition throughout western North Carolina that emphasized the growth of regional tourism. By centering this study on the growth of regional tourism, this research also analyzes regional boosters’ efforts to manufacture and commodify a racialized and classed folk culture within the region for tourist consumption. In the late nineteenth century, journalists and folklorists had emphasized the deviance of mountain life and simultaneously romanticized the area as a land of rugged, white …

Analysis Of Artifacts And Storage Organization: Clinton Lock 2, Hannah Curtis

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

For this project, we are hoping to address the potential problems and help refine future work between the storage in the Cummings Center and the Anthropology Department. Some of the research questions that we have are: What is in the Cummings Center from the Anthropology Department? What type of techniques is the most beneficial in storing archaeological material? How are the items stored in the Cummings Center? Is this method of storage going to protect or damage the artifact? Do we still need to keep this material, returned to its original owner, or can it be deaccessioned? We plan to …

Ledgers Of The W.T. Carter And Brother Lumber Company: An Archival Processing Project, Christopher Cameron Cotton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The W.T. Carter and Brother Lumber Company began in 1898 and operated until 1968 when it was sold to the U.S. Plywood Corporation. The Polk County, Texas company harvested longleaf pine during a crucial period of development for the Texas economy. The lumber industry was the state’s first large scale commercial enterprise not dependent on farming and provided a model for future extractive industries in the state. The W.T. Carter and Brother Lumber Company town of Camden, Texas exemplifies rural implementations of the company town system in the Texas lumber industry. This public history thesis provides a brief history of …

[Dis]Assembling Race: The Fepc In Oklahoma, 1941-1946, Arley Ward

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

On the World War II home front in Oklahoma the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) succeeded in securing defense jobs for African Americans. The efforts of the committee, The Oklahoma Eagle, the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch, and the State Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) advanced civil rights in Oklahoma throughout World War II and beyond. The efforts of the FEPC in Oklahoma connect civil rights efforts in the 1940s directly to Brown v Board of Education, (1954) and the classic civil rights movement.

Positioning The 1913 Paterson Silk Workers’ Strike Within A Dialectical Framework, Raymond Adam Ciafarone Jr.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis places the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike within a dialectical framework by historically surveying the constant motion of industry in Paterson, New Jersey. It follows the dialectical method by examining the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike not as a singular event but as one part of a continuous historical process. In the late 18th century, a group of investors introduced capitalism to Paterson and completely transformed the social relations of production from a mostly self-sufficient agrarian existence to a center of capitalist manufacturing. From that moment forward, production in Paterson was in a constant state of flux as mills, shops, …

The Free Arena Of Literature: Science Fiction Films’ Critiques Of Capitalism In The United States, John (Jack) Michael Bilello

History

Capitalism is an inherently flawed system. The ideologies of Karl Marx have remained relevant for their critiques of the system, yet socially, his ideas are not accepted in the capitalist United States. Capitalism, as the dominant economic system of western civilization, has become synonymous with patriotism in the U.S. This has proved incredibly harmful to criticisms of capitalism, as they are met with questions of allegiance and patriotism rather than a careful reconsideration of ideals. Through science fiction films, these ideas that are usually difficult to express become much more palatable to a capitalist society. But to fully appreciate the …

The Congress Of Industrial Organizations: Operation Dixie And A Legacy Of Worker Activism, Trevor G. Porter

Honors Theses

Trevor George Porter: The Congress of Industrial Organizations: Operation Dixie and a Legacy of Worker Activism (Under the Direction of Dr. Jarod Roll)

The passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 overhauled United States labor law, and it shifted the balance of power in favor of organized labor. Seizing upon this monumental moment in history, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was founded with a mandate to “organize the unorganized”. The labor federation made its primary focus the mass production workers of America, many of whom had not previously been afforded the opportunity to join a union. This …

The Challenge Of E. Pluribus Unum: Waterfront Workers During The Civil War In Buffalo, New York, Anthony E. Gil

History Theses

This work is pioneering in that it opens discussion and historical inquiry into events of civil unrest in the U.S., both during the Civil War and in 1860s Buffalo, New York. It is the position of this study that events of early civil unrest are boiling points in the development of our great melting pot. Indeed, the more historians explore and understand these moments in American history, the easier it is to see profound epochs relative to America's growing pains. And, although there are many epochs that tell the story of those growing pains, "The Challenge of E. Pluribus Unum: …

Smashing Solidarity: Two New York Strikes At The Start Of The Postwar Wave, Joseph D. Parziale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two strikes in New York at the beginning of the massive 1945-46 strike wave—one by elevator operators in commercial buildings and another by dock workers throughout the Port of New York—can help us better understand a moment when workers exhibited a profound sense of themselves as a class, while their rivals in the shop, the corporate boardroom, and the halls of power fought vigorously to dispel the notion that workers divided by geography, industry, race, nationality, and gender were right to see their fates as intertwined. Historians’ focus on the economic issues at stake in the major strikes of the …

“‘The Negro Had Been Run Over Long Enough By White Men, And It Was Time They Defend Themselves’: African-American Mutinies And The Long Emancipation, 1861-1974”, Scott F. Thompson

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This dissertation analyzes racially motivated mutinies by black military servicemen from the Civil War to the Vietnam War. Resistance against white supremacy in the armed forces illustrates the commitment of generations of African Americans to a vision of freedom centered on bodily, familial, and socioeconomic autonomy. These mutinies thereby warrant the reframing of emancipation as a centuries’-long process rather than a single event confined to the 1860s. Subscribing to martial masculinity, black servicemen believed acting forcefully, and risking their lives or well-being as a result, offered the best path to earning their human rights. African-American sailors enjoyed the opportunities offered …

The Road To Self-Support: Vocational Rehabilitation And The Associational State, 1917-1945, William Jared Norwood

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

“The Road to Self-Support: Vocational Rehabilitation and the Associational State, 1917-1945” traces the origins and development of the Civilian Vocational Rehabilitation (CVR) program from its inception in 1920 until the conclusion of the Second World War. Rapid industrialization and the fallout of the First World War handed the nation a large amount of people with disabilities, which drew on already strained state and local welfare relief. The project examines the interwar period and finds it to be a battleground of differing governing strategies over how best to solve America’s growing level of disabled workers. The project argues that policymakers settled …

Regulating Rideshare In Progressive Era California Cities: Jitneys In San Francisco And Los Angeles 1914-1919, Nathaniel Huntington

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis looks at the regulatory responses to the jitney craze from San Francisco and Los Angeles municipal governments from 1914-1919. Beyond just looking at jitneys as a new form of public transportation, it seeks to understand discussions about the right to public space during the Progressive Era. In doing so, the burgeoning power of these city governments in shaping urban life becomes evident. Whether jitneys promoted or hurt the public good became a central question, often framed around how much space jitneys should be given. It argues that in regulating where the jitney could operate, municipalities sought to maintain …

Doctors, Miners, And Black Lung: A Transatlantic Comparison Of Organized Medicine's Role In The Fight For Black Lung Recognition In West Virginia And Wales, Mollie M. Cecil Md

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Black lung disease is a crippling occupational lung disease experienced by coal miners throughout the world. However, this disease was not always recognized by the medical profession and required significant efforts on the part of miners’ unions to force mainstream recognition. The historiography on the subject is limited, especially with respect to the relationship between organized medicine and organized labor. This work further explores this relationship, particularly how this relationship differed between the parties in Wales and in West Virginia. In doing so, it portrays a more detailed picture of the fight for black lung recognition as well as highlights …