Labor History Commons^™

Protest Lyrics At Work: Labor Resistance Poetry Of Depression-Era Autoworkers, Rebecca S. Griffin

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that scholarly inquiry into American poetry of the Great Depression is incomplete without a critical understanding of poems produced within the labor movement. Through archival research and methodologies drawn from American studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and labor history, this dissertation demonstrates that autoworkers from 1935-1941 developed a rich poetic discourse that championed their cause. Autoworker poets—including autoworker song lyricists—used humor and borrowed extensively from popular, religious, and “folk” cultures to craft their own poetic styles and trope sets. They wrote about a diverse range of topics from their hopes for the unionization movement, to scab conversions, …

Troubles At Coal Creek: Rhetorics Of Writing, Research, And The Archive, Sumner Stevenson Brown

Masters Theses

Digging through the past can uncover painful truths. As such, historiography that does not acknowledge negotiated spaces, cultural erasures, and flexible frameworks may fall short. It may limit both breadth and depth of the past, thereby (re)producing erasures, whereas a reflexive theoretical framework delivers not only depth and breadth, but it also adds texture and dimension to historical writing and research processes. It is for these purposes that the value of alternative methodologies is not situated at the margins of the rhetorical canons. Instead, it is embedded in the very core of the canons, defined as an element that works …

How The City Of Indianapolis Came To Have African American Policemen And Firemen 80 Years Before The Modern Civil Rights Movement., Leon E. Bates

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores a series of events that occurred in the spring of 1876. The relationship between the Indianapolis city government, the Marion County Courts, the Indianapolis Police Department, and the African American community came together to usher in changes never before envisioned. The Indianapolis Police Department (IPD) was formed in 1855, then disbanded 12 months later in a political dispute. From 1857-to-1876, the IPD was all white. These changes took place as the Reconstruction era was coming to a close. The first Ku Klux Klan was at its apex, terrorizing black communities, and Jim Crow was coming into its …

Major League Baseball's Latin American Connection: Salaries, Scouting, And Globalization, Ezequiel Kitsu Lihosit

Theses

This research examines the history of foreign, Latin American Major League baseball players. It looks at the history of the players, their countries and the expansion of recruitment and training in Latin America. Other factors such as race and labor relations contributed greatly to shifts in player recruitment by MLB. Baseball is an international game and today more than 25% of all major leaguers are foreign-born Latin Americans. This project lays out how this occurred and how the academy training system has evolved and become the industry standard for teams. Through both the history of the earliest Latin American players …

Complicating The Narrative: Labor, Feminism, And Civil Rights In The United Teachers Of New Orleans Strike Of 1990, Emma Long

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In 1990, over 3,000 of 4,500 New Orleans public school teachers refused to enter their classrooms over a contract dispute with their employer, the Orleans Parish School Board. For three weeks, teachers picketed while the negotiating team for their union, The United Teachers of New Orleans, worked to reach a contract agreement. Using interviews with striking teachers and union leaders, this paper aims to tell this story from their perspective. The interviews shed light on the ways that minorities and women used UTNO, with the incorporated ideologies and strategies of civil rights and feminism, as a platform to combat economic, …

Approaches To The Land, Joseph Linscott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Approaches to the Land is a collection of interrelated stories centered on a small Maine mill town. These stories have several recurrent narrators who are in many phases of moving – some come while others leave, etc. These stories have an immense interest in the identification of loss and hope, and this in turn plays heavily on the identities of the characters embodying the stories. As a whole, these stories capture the only way this author knew how to document his hometown.

The Unwanted Immigrant, Frank A. Bozich Iii

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

The social and religious differences between Chinese migrants and Americans of European descent played a large role in the exploitation of the Chinese. Ultimately, nativism became ingrained in Californian society as Irish Americans began to view Chinese as a threat to their economic success and violence toward Chinese became more common due to the Californian government’s support of anti-Chinese and nativist legislation.

Haymarket & Immigration: A Legacy Of Anarchist Fear, Kaysie Harrington

Honors Projects

The 1903 Alien Immigration Act, more commonly known as the Anti-Anarchist Act, was the first United States immigration policy to exclude persons based on political ideology. The following research explores the evolution of anti-anarchist sentiment in the US, following one of the nation’s first experiences with anarchist behavior: The Chicago Haymarket Affair of 1886, an incident in which a pipe bomb thrown in midst of a labor riot ultimately led to the arrest and highly publicized prosecution of eight anarchists. After the Haymarket Affair, both the United States government and the public defined anarchism as being the domain of alien …

The Economy, Representation, And Revolt: Social Unrest In Florence In The Wake Of The Black Death, Jacob David Brannum

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Finding Manilatown: The Search For Seattle’S Filipino American Community, 1898 – 2016, John D. Nonato

History Undergraduate Theses

Filipino presence in the United States has a long history from the time of the Spanish Empire. Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-American War (1898) resulted in American acquisition of the Philippine islands. By granting Filipinos ‘national’ status, a new wave of post-Spanish Colonial immigration began to the United States. As Filipinos immigrated for education and work to the U.S., they began settling within urban areas and created Manilatowns. These Manilatowns were almost always settled in conjunction with other ethnic enclaves, most of these being Chinatowns. In this paper, I examine the rise and fall of Seattle’s Manilatown and its role …

"Disreputable Houses Of Some Very Reputable Negroes": Paternalism And Segregation Of Colonial Williamsburg, Nora Ann Knight

Senior Projects Spring 2016

This project attempts to intertwine the intentionally separated narratives of the foundation of Colonial Williamsburg and the narrative of Williamsburg's black community.

Unions In Waterloo, Iowa: How Organization, Political Activism, And Community Outreach Led To The Rise And Fall Of Organized Labor, 1947-1990, Dylan Christian Krauter Keller

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

I will explore the three foundations for union strength and success that were present in Waterloo: organization and representation, political activism/awakening, and community outreach. Unions’ solidarity and strength can be attributed to these foundations, but they also created limitations that led to the local unions’ decline in Waterloo.

Part I focuses on the relationship between organization and representation and the political awakening in 1947. It argues that Waterloo unions’ political activism from 1947 to 1964 expanded the local’s presence in the community. Campaigning, electing candidates who were members of a union, and developing a labor agenda resulted in positive growth …

Run Of The Mine: Miners, Farmers, And The Non-Union Spirit Of The Gilded Age, 1886-1896, Dana M. Caldemeyer

Theses and Dissertations--History

“Run of the Mine” examines why workers refused to join unions in the late nineteenth century. Through a focus on the men and women involved in the southern Midwest coal industry who quit or did not join unions, this dissertation analyzes the economic, geographic, and racial factors that contributed to workers’ attitudes toward national unions like the United Mine Workers of America (UMW). It argues that the fluidity between rural industries that allowed residents to work in multiple occupations throughout the year dramatically shaped worker expectations for their unions. This occupational fluidity that allowed miners to farm and farmers to …

Women At The Crossroads, Women At The Forefront, American Women In Letterpress Printing In The Nineteenth Century, Dianne L. Roman Ms

Theses and Dissertations

The significant role of the female printer in the American home-based print shops during the colonial and early republic periods has been documented in print history, socioeconomic, labor, and women studies, yet with the industrialization of the printing trade, women’s presence is thought to have disappeared. Contrary to the belief that industrialization of the print shop eradicated women’s involvement in skilled employments such as typesetting, the creation of the Women’s Cooperative Printing Union in California and the creation and chartering of the Women’s Typographical Union in New York, both in the late 1860s, clearly indicate that women continued to work …