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Winter 2013
 January 18 / Friday / 1pm / 4041 HSSB: KEVIN KRUSE, Professor of History at Princeton University, offers a paper and talk "'Freedom Under God': Corporations and Christian Libertarianism against the New Deal." Kruse is the author of the prize-winning White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2006) and the editor, most recently, of The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (2012). His new book project is "One Nation Under God: Corporations, Christianity and the Roots of the Religious Right."
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 February 8 / Friday / 1pm / 4041 HSSB: NAN ENSTAD, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, discusses "Corporate Imaginaries and the Making of a Cigarette Empire." Professor Enstad is the author of Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1999). Her new book project is "The Jim Crow Cigarette: Following Tobacco Road from North Carolina to China and Back." Her paper can be found here.
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 February 22 / Friday / 1pm / 4041 HSSB: AMY SLATON, Professor of History at Drexel University, offers a paper "The Neoliberal Logic of the Two-Tiered Workforce." Slaton is the author of Race, Rigor and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line (2010) and Reinforced Concrete and the Modernization of American Building, 1900-1930 (2001). Her new book project considers the challenges facing two-year colleges seeking a workforce for high-tech America.
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Fall 2012
 September 28 / Friday / 1:00 PM / 4041 HSSB: SCOTT NELSON, Legum Professor of History at the College of William & Mary, discusses his new book A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters, at 1 p.m. in 4041 HSSB. Nelson is the author of Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of An American Legend (2008) which won the Merle Curti Prize for the best book in U.S. social and cultural history.
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 October 17 / Wednesday / 4:00 PM / McCune Conference Room, HSSB: Forum, "Higher Education and California Voters: Can this Election Save UC?" Speakers include Assemblyman Das Williams; Chris Newfield, Professor of English; and Gene Lucas, Executive Vice Chancellor. Sponsored by the UCSB Faculty Association. More information on Proposition 30, including sites dedicted to arguments for and against the voter proposition can be found here.
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 October 26 / Friday / 1:00 PM / 4041 HSSB: PAUL PIERSON, Political Science, UC Berkeley. Pierson speaks on "American Democracy in an Era of Rising Inequality." He is the author, with Jacob Hacker, of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned its Back on the Middle Class (2010).
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 November 30 / Friday / 1:00 PM / 4041 HSSB: GRETA KRIPPNER, Sociology, University of Michigan. Krippner speaks on “Possessive Collectivism: Ownership and the Politics of Credit Line Analysis in Late 20th Century America.” Her Capitalizing on Crisis: the Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (2011) won the President’s Book Award from the Social Science History Association and the Viviana Zelizer Award from the American Sociological Association.
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Summer 2012 |
| June 29 / Friday / 1:00 PM / 4041 HSSB: "Labor's Fate after Wisconsin," featuring Heather and Paul Booth. Both are long-time political activists. Heather Booth founded the Midwest Academy, a training center for organizers, and she has worked closely with labor groups and the Democratic Party to register millions of new minority voters, advance the AFL-CIO health care agenda and the Dodd/Frank financial reform law, and defend Social Security and Medicare. Paul Booth, a leader of the antiwar movement in the 1960s, has for many years been the organizing director for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Based in Chicago, both Heather and Paul Booth were actively involved in the labor effort to oppose Governor Scott Walker's anti-union agenda and then to recall the governor in the recent election. |
Spring 2012
 April 6th / Friday / 1:00 PM / 4041 HSSB: ELIZABETH TANDY SHERMER, History, University of Cambridge and Loyola University of Chicago. Her talk is "'A Frankenstein's Monster:'
Sacred and Secular Populism in Sunbelt Phoenix." Professor Shermer’s Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Reconstruction of American Politics appears in 2013.
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 April 27th / Friday / 1:00 PM / 4041 HSSB: ERIKA RAPPAPORT, History, UCSB. Professor Rappaport speaks on “Tea is the Food of the People’: Taxes, Tariffs and the Politics of the Imperial Consumerism in Early Twentieth-Century Britain.” She is the author of Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (2000).
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 POSTPONED
May 4th / Friday / 1:00 PM / 4041 HSSB: PAUL PIERSON, Political Science, UC Berkeley. Pierson speaks on "American Democracy in an Era of Rising Inequality." He is the author, with Jacob Hacker, of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned its Back on the Middle Class (2010).
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 May 11th / Friday / 1:00 PM / 4041 HSSB: STEPHAN MIESCHER. History, UCSB. He talks on "Creating an American Island: The Volta Aluminum Company (VALCO) in Ghana, 1964-2000." Miescher is the co-editor of Africa After Gender (2007) and author of Making Men in Ghana (2005).
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 June 8th / Friday / 1:00 PM / 4041 HSSB: STEPHEN CAMPBELL, History UCSB. Campbell offers a paper, "Fear Itself: Biddle's Panic, 1833-34." Derived from his dissertation, Campbell’s presentation argues that politics and psychology mattered more than economic conditions in explaining the character of this antebellum recession.
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Winter 2012
 January 13 / Friday / 1:00 PM / 4041 HSSB: LANDON STORRS, History, University of Houston. Professor Storrs speaks on "Hidden Convictions: the Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal," which is also the title of her forthcoming book. In 2000 Storrs published Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era.
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 January 20 Friday / 1:00 PM / 4041 HSSB: FRED BLOCK, Sociology, University of California, Davis. His talk is on "Karl Polanyi, Social Democracy, and the Current Crisis". Block is the editor, most recently, of State of Innovation: The U.S. Government's Role in Technological Policy (2011) and is now completing Karl Polanyi and the Battle of Economic Ideas. His precirculated paper can be found here.
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 January 27 / Friday / 1:00 PM / 4041 HSSB: ERIC ARNESEN, History, George Washington University, offers a paper, “Civil Rights and the Cold War At Home: Post-War Activism, Anticommunism, and the Decline of the Left.”
Arnesen is the author of Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (2001) and Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923. He is writing a biography of A. Philip Randolph.
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 February 2-3: "THE PORT HURON STATEMENT AT 50." A conference on the history, impact, and contemporary relevance of the New Left's founding manifesto. Keynote speakers: Michael Kazin and Tom Hayden. Among the other participants: Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Richard Flacks, Joshua Freeman, Daniel Geary, Grace Hale, Jane Mansbridge, Lisa McGirr, James Miller, Bob Ross, Eric Olin Wright, and many Port Huron veterans. Co-sponsored by Dissent, The Nation, and the Associated Students. Conference begins at 2:30pm in Corwin Pavilion. To view the schedule and register for the conference, please visit the conference site here.
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 February 17 / Friday / 1:00 PM / 4041 HSSB : RICHARD WHITE, History, Stanford University. He speaks on "The Antimonopoly Tradition in Gilded Age America." Professor White is the author of The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (1991), "It's Your Misfortune and None of my Own": A History of the American West (1991) and Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011). His precirculated paper can be found here.
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| Fall 2011 |
 October 7 / 1 PM / 4041 HSSB: STEVE EARLY, author and unionist. “Capital’s War on Labor: Labor’s Civil Wars.” Early, who worked for 27 years as an organizer for the Communications Workers of America, is a prolific labor journalist and the author of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of a New Labor Movement or Death Throes of the Old? (2011) and Embedded with Organized Labor: Reflections on the Class War at Home (2009). Click here to read Early’s essay. His blog can be found here.
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 October 14 / 9 AM / McCune Room, Sixth Floor, HSSB: “Symposium on the New History of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.” In this all-day event a new generation of scholars draw upon fresh research to offer a set of bold and innovative interpretations explaining the rise and fall of the California farm worker movement. Keynote speaker: veteran labor activist and educator, Frank Bardacke, author of Trampling Out the Vintage: César Chávez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers (2011). Click here for the full schedule.
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 October 20 / 4 PM / McCune Room, Sixth Floor, HSSB: NELSON LICHTENSTEIN, MacArthur Foundation Chair in History, UCSB, “Public Goods and Those Who Create Them: From Respect to Disdain in Modern America.” Lichtenstein is director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy. His lecture is part of the series, “Public Goods,” sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
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 October 28 / 1 PM / 4041 HSSB: ALICE O’CONNOR, Professor of History, UCSB. “Narrating the Great Recession: Economic Crisis and the Politics of Late Twentieth Century Economic Reform." O’Connor is the author of Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in 20th Century U.S. History (2001) and Social Science For What?: Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up (2007).
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 November 4 / 1PM / 4041 HSSB: RICK PERLSTEIN, historian and journalist. “Invisible Bridge: The 1970s and the Rise of Ronald Reagan” Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001) and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2009). He is writing a biography of Ronald Reagan.
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 December 2 / 1 PM / 4041 HSSB: DARAKA LARIMORE-HALL, UCSB Department of Sociology. "Labor, Democrats and Party Reform: 1968-1972." Larimore-Hall is the former president of UAW Local 2865, the UC union of TAs, readers, and tutors, and he is currently chair of the Santa Barbara Democratic Party. .
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2010-2011 Speakers
 April 15 / 1 PM / 4041 HSSB: DANIEL ERNST, Georgetown University Law Center.
“Government Lawyers and Bureaucratic Autonomy in the New Deal.” Ernst is the author of the prize-winning Lawyers Against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism (1995) and Total War and the Law: the American Home Front in World War II. (2003). |
April 29/ 1 PM / HSSB 4041: KATHERINE STONE, UCLA School of Law.
“Globalization and Flexibilization: The Remaking of the Employee Relationship in the 21st Century.” Stone is the author of the prize-winning From Widgets to Digits: Employment Regulation for the Changing Workplace (2004), as well as dozens of path-breaking law review essays on work and employment. |
 May 6 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: TOM JURAVICH, Sociology and Labor Studies, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
"The Degradation of Work in the 21st Century."
Juravich is a labor educator and musician. He is the author of Chaos
on the Shop Floor: A Worker's View of Quality, Productivity and Management (1985); an ethnography of a bitter labor struggle in West Virginia, Ravenswood: The Steelworkers' Victory and the Revival of American Labor, with Kate Bronfenbrenner, (1999); and At the Altar of the Bottom Line: The Degradation of Work in the 21st Century (2009).
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May 13 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: REUEL SCHILLER, University of California, Hasting College of Law.
“Civil Rights Protest and Labor Union Autonomy: The 1966 Hilton Hotel Protests and the Fate of Postwar Liberalism.” Schiller's areas of academic interest are twentieth-century American legal history,
administrative law, and labor and employment law. A forthcoming book compares the legal strategies of the labor movement and the civil rights movement in the years since the Second World War. Click here to read Professor Schiller's cover memo on his forthcoming book and click here to read a chapter from that work.
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June 3 / 1 PM / 4041 HSSB: STEVEN ATTEWELL, UCSB Department of History.
“Right to Work? Rethinking the Promise of Full Employment in the 1945 Moment.” Attewell is a Ph.D candidate in the Policy History Program in the History Department. “Right to Work?” is a chapter in the forthcoming dissertation, "Public At Work: Direct Job Creation Policy from the New Deal to the Rise of Reagan," which studies the development of the "missing link" in the American welfare state through a focus on policy design, institutions, economic theories, and political ideology. Previous chapters have been presented at the Policy History Conference and at the LERF/IRLE Conference. |
 January 21 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: CLYDE WOODS, Black Studies, UCSB.
“The Crisis, Los Angeles’ Black Communities, and the Failed State Debate.” Woods is the author of Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (2000) and editor of Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (2007). He is now part of a community/academic team studying development policy in Los Angeles.
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 February 18 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041:
NEIL FLIGSTEIN, Sociology, UC Berkeley. “A Long Strange Trip: The State and the Market for Mortgage Securitization, 1968-2010.” Fligstein is the author of Markets, Politics, and Globalization (1997) and The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of Capitalist Societies (2002). His current work evaluates how policies in the 1980s and 1990s to “maximize shareholder value” effected the organization of American industries and working conditions.
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 February 25 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: JULIA OTT, New School for Social Research.
“When Wall Street Met Main Street, 1890-1932.” Ott’s book of the same title will be published by Harvard University Press in the spring of 2011. Her next project considers the enduring influence of financial institutions and pro-investor ideology in recent U. S. political history.
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 March 4 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: BARRY EICHENGREEN, Economics and Political Science, UC Berkeley.
“It’s May be Our Currency, but It’s Your Problem.” A former advisor to the International Monetary Fund, Eichengreen is the author of Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (2008) and Global Imbalances and the Lessons of Bretton Woods (2006).
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October 8 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: MATT GARCIA, History and Ethnic Studies, Brown University. “Busy Dying: The United Farm Workers and Caesar Chavez on the Eve of Self-destruction.” Garcia is the author of the prize-winning World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 (2001) and the forthcoming Geographies of Latinidad: Mapping Latina/o Studies for the Twenty-First Century.
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October 29 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: CASSANDRA ENGEMAN, Sociology, UCSB, “The Dynamics of Social Movement Unionism: Local Union Involvement in Immigrants’ Rights Movements in Los Angeles.” Engeman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology. Her work focuses on social movements and social movement outcomes, union-community coalitions in the United States, and union strategy. She has recently presented her work at the UCLA IRLE "Strategic Decision-Making in Labor and Social Movements" conference. |
No vember 5 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: ANDREW ROSS, Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University. “Green Jobs/Sustainable Labor in the Age of Climate Justice.” Ross has published 17 books, including No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989), Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade (2006) The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace (2007), and Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (2009).
 December 3 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041; STEVEN LERNER, Service Employees International Union. “Is Conventional Trade Unionism Obsolete?” Lerner is an architect of the groundbreaking Justice for Janitors campaign. He has been a union strategist for more than three decades and writes frequently for both the mainstream press and scholarly publications. He currently directs the SEIU’s effort to hold banks and other financial institutions accountable for their employment effects on our economy and workplace.
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2009-2010 Speakers
| Spring 2010 |
April 16 / 1 PM / H SSB 4041: THOMAS ANDREWS (History, University of Colorado, Denver), "Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War." Andrews, an environmental historian of the American West, won the 2009 Bancroft Prize for his book of the same title, which reconsiders the social and environmental meaning of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. Co-sponsored by the Center for Science and Technology and the Environmental Studies Program. |
 April 30 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: THEDA SKOCPOL (Harvard, Sociology), "Obama's Agenda and the Dynamics of U.S. Politics." Skocpol is the author, most recently, of Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn (2005, with Lawrence R. Jacobs); and The Transformation of American Politics: Activist Government and the Rise of Conservatism (2007, with Paul Pierson). |
 May 7 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: J. DOUGLAS SMITH (Occidential College, History), "On Democracy's Doorstep: Reapportionment and the Quest for Equality in 20th Century America." Professor Smith's Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia appeared in 2002. His current project examines one of the nation's most serious but understudied distortions to the idea of "one person, one vote." |
May 14 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: JESSICA WANG (University of British Columbia, History) "What are Dogs Good for in a City?: Rabies, Civilization, and Urban Anxiety in New York City, 1850-1920." Professor Wang's American Science in an Age of Anxiety (1999), provided a major study of the effects of Cold War anticommunism on the American scientific community.
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Winter 2010 |
 January 15 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041:
LARRY BARTELS (Princeton, Political Science) "Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age." Bartels is the author of Presidential Primaries and the Dynamics of Public Choice (1988) and Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (2008). He will also deliver a public lecture Thursday / January 14 / 4 PM /
Lane Room, 3824 Ellison Hall . Co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science.
Click here to read chapter one ("The New Gilded Age") of Unequal Democracy. Click here for chapter 3 ("Class Politics and Partisan Change"). Click here for chapter 9 ("Economic Inequality and Political Representation"). |
 January 29 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: JEFFREY B. PERRY (Independent Scholar, Trade Unionist) "The Importance of Hubert Harrison (1883-1927): "The Voice of Harlem Radicalism." Perry is a long-time union activist and editor for the National Postal Mail Handlers Union. He is the author of Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 (2008). He edited Theodore W. Allen’s Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race (2006).
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 February 5 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041:
KATIE QUAN (UC Berkeley Labor Center) "Missing Link: China and Global Struggles Against Walmart." Quan is Associate Chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center and this year’s Hull Lecturer. She speaks on "Women Sweatshop Workers: Victims of Exploitation or Agents of Change?" Thursday / February 4 / 4 PM / Multicultural Center. Co-sponsored by the Feminist Studies, Asian American Studies, and the Multicultural Center. |
  February 26 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: JENNIFER KLEIN (Yale, History) and EILEEN BORIS (UCSB, Feminist Studies)
"Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State." Klein is the author of For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (2003). Boris is Hull Professor of Feminist Studies
the author of Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework (1994). Click here to read the article by Boris and Klein, "Organizing the Carework Economy."
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 March 5 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: SVEN BECKERT (Harvard, History)
"The Empire of Cotton: A Global History ." Beckert is the author of The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie (2001). He organizes the biannual History of Capitalism Conferences hosted at Harvard University.
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2008-2009 Speakers |
| Fall 2009 |
 October 14 / 3 PM to 11 PM / Campbell Hall: "Defending the University: A 'Teach-In" on the Current Crisis." Speakers include Stan Glantz, UC San Francisco, on UCOP’s budget blunders; George Lakoff, UC Berkeley, on framing the issues; Ruth Gilmore, University of Southern California, on California’s prison complex; California Senator Loni Hancock, on Sacramento’s legislative deadlock; Art Pulaski, California AFL-CIO, on labor’s stake in UC’s future; Nelson Lichtenstein, UCSB, on Clark Kerr’s forgotten legacy; plus student, staff and other faculty.
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 October 23 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041 : WILLIAM NOVAK (University of Chicago, History) "The 'Myth' of the Weak American State." Novak’s first book, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America, used nineteenth-century state court records to document the long history of governmental activism in the United States. His next book is The Creation of the Modern American State. |
 November 6 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: CRISTOPHER MCAULEY (UCSB, Black Studies) "Shaping Max Weber and W.E.B. Du Bois: Scholarship, Politics, and Protection." McAuley’s The Mind of Oliver C. Cox appeared in 2004. He is writing a comparative study of the politics and scholarship of Max Weber and W.E.B. Du Bois, a portion of which is the subject of his talk. |
 November 20 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: MARK HENDRICKSON (UC San Diego, History) “’New Capitalism:’ Rights, Expectations, and Fairness in the New Era Economy.” Hendrickson’s research focuses on labor, public policy, capitalism and political economy in early twentieth century U.S. History. He has held fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, Aspen Institute, and the Institute for Labor and Employment Studies. He took his PhD in history at UCSB in 2004. |
| Summer 2009 |
 July 21: Book signing with Nelson Lichtenstein. Everything you wanted to know about America's largest and most controversial company... Professor Lichtenstein's new book on Wal-Mart is out! Join him at 7 p.m. at Chaucer's Bookstore (3321 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA) for a talk on the internal life of the company and how it will fare under Barrack Obama. To read what Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, says about The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created A Brave New World of Business, click here. To purchase a copy on Amazon click here. |
| Spring 2009 |
 April 3 / 4041 HSSB: WILLIAM GREIDER "The Great Transformation (or Not?)." Legendary reporter and author William Greider has covered American politics for the last 40 years as a columnist and editor for the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and as a national affairs correspondent for The Nation. In his recently released book Come Home America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country, Greider examines the effects of current American economic policy-including our drive to remain “Number One” in the global arena - and its impact on our democratic ideals and values. This seminar is co-presented with UCSB Department of History as part of the Critical Issues Forum titled Economic Justice: Policy and the Political Imagination and the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy and the Policy History Program.
For additional articles by William Greider click here.
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 April 10 / 4041 HSSB: JOHN MUNRO (UCSB, History) "Empire's Adversaries: Cold War Critics of Colonialism in the United States, 1945-1960."
John Munro's dissertation looks at anticolonial discourse in the United States between World War II and the 1960s. Recipient of awards from the UC Labor and Employment Research Fund, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, John has published on whiteness studies, African American anti-imperialism, and US empire.
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 April 24 / HSSB 4041: JILL JENSEN (UCSB, History) "For the "Social and Economic Security of all Peoples”: Developing Postwar Social Programs through the International Labor Organization, 1947-1954." Jill Jensen studies labor and social policy and is currently writing a dissertation on the history of labor standards relating to the work of the International Labor Organization (ILO). Her paper describes how activists in the United States cooperated with the ILO to conceptualize policies in support of greater and more widespread social and economic justice in the years following WW II. In so doing, they made the connection between the domestic labor standards of individual countries and their implications for the global arena.
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April 30 / Campbell Hall: STEVE GREENHOUSE "The Big Squeeze-Tough Times for the
American Worker." The New York Times’ Steven Greenhouse is the nation’s most authoritative
reporter on labor and employment issues, defining what constitutes the news even as he reports it. For
15 years his investigative exposes have probed the way some of the nation’s largest corporations
treat—and mistreat—their workers, from the Brooklyn waterfront to the Piedmont South, and from
Toyota assembly lines to Wal-Mart check-out counters. His first book, The Big Squeeze—Tough
Times for the American Worker, is an eye-opening account of how the corporate clamp-down on
wages, benefits, and job security has made efforts to climb out of the current economic crisis all the
more difficult. Greenhouse comes to UCSB as the Regents’ Lecturer in History.
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 May 8 / HSSB 4041: VIVYAN ADAIR (Hamilton College, Women's Studies) "Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education in the United States." This seminar follows Professor Adair's public lecture on May 7 at 4 PM in the UCen Harbor Room, featuring her exhibit of photographs and narratives about women, their experiences with poverty and welfare, and how access to higher education has made a difference in their lives. |
 May 22 / HSSB 4041: MATTHEW LASSITER (University of Michigan, History) “Suburban Panics: Lost Innocence and Moral Crusades in California Politics.” Lassiter is the author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (2006). |
 May 29 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: MARY FURNER, UCSB, History, "From "State Interference to the "Return to the Market": The Rhetoric of Economic Regulation from the Old Gilded Age to the New." Professor Furner’s research looks at connections between the creation of social and economic knowledge and changing visions of the role of the state in economic, social, and moral development. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Fulbright Program. Her current project is The Public and Its Limit: Statism and Anti-Statism in the American Political Tradition, 1880-1950. |
| Winter 2009 |
 January 23, 2009: Will Jones (University of Wisconsin, History) “The Infrastructure of South-Central Los Angeles: Race, Unions and the 'New Inequality,'” 1 p.m., HSSB 4041. Jones is author of The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South (2005). His new book project is The New Color of Class: Race and Inequality in the Service Economy.
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 February 6, 2009: Heather Thompson (University of North Carolina, Charlotte, History), “The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and the Creation of the Carceral State: Rethinking The Fall of Labor and The Rise of the Right in Postwar America,” 1 p.m., HSSB 4041. Thompson published Whose Detroit? The Politics of Labor, Race, and Liberalism in Modern American City in 2001. She is now completing a book on the Attica Prison Uprising and its historical legacy.
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 February 20, 2009: Willy Forbath (University of Texas, Austin, Law and History) “Social Movements, Social Rights, and the Courts in South Africa and the USA,” 1 p.m., HSSB 4041. Forbath is the author of Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (1991), numerous law review articles and two forthcoming books, Social Rights in the American Grain and Courting the State: Law and the Making of the Modern American State. |
 March 6, 2009: Dana Frank (University of California, Santa Cruz, History) "The AFL-CIA's Cold War in Honduras--and How Hondurans Felt About It," 1 p.m., HSSB 4041. Frank is Co-Director of the UCSC Center for Labor Studies. Her books include Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (2008), Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (2000), and Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929 (1994). |
2008 Speakers |
Fall 2008 |
Alex Lichtenstein, (History, Florida International): "The
End of Southern Liberalism: Race, Class and the Defeat of
Claude Pepper in the 1950 Florida Democratic Primary," Friday, September 26, 2 p.m., HSSB 4041.
Lichtenstein is the author of Twice the Work of Free Labor:
The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (1995). His current research examines the interplay of the civil
rights and labor movements in Florida during the 1940s. |
Bill
Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin, "Solidarity
Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward
Social Justice," Friday, October 10, 1 p.m. , HSSB
4041.
Fletcher, a longtime labor and international activist,
is executive editor of Black Commentator and founder
of the Center for Labor Renewal. Gapasin is a Central Labor
Council President and former professor of Industrial Relations
and Chicana/o Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Fletcher
is also the author of The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers
and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. |
 Tobias
Higbie (History, UCLA): "Working-Class
Readers, Libraries and Networks of Self-Education in the Progressive
Era," Friday, October 17, 1 p.m., HSSB 4041.
Higbie is the author of Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers
and Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930 (2003),
which won the Philip Taft Labor Prize in Labor History.
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 Gilbert
G. Gonzalez (School of Social Sciences, UC Irvine): "Migration
Patterns, Border Capitalism and the Bracero Program,"
Friday, November 14, 1 p.m., HSSB 4020. (This talk will not be held in HSSB 4041.)
Gonzalez is Professor of Social Sciences
and Director of the Labor Studies Program at UC Irvine. He
is the author of Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation
(1990) and Culture of Empire: American Writers, Mexico,
and Mexican Immigrants, 1880-1930 (2004).
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Spring 2008 |
 Luis Figueroa (History, Trinity College) "Flight of Fancy: Whiteness, Suburbanization, and Identity in San Juan Puerto Rico Since 1940," Friday April 4.
Luis Figueroa's scholarly interests include slavery, post-emancipation, and racial discourses and practices in the Caribbean. He is the author of Sugar, Slavery and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico (2005). His new research project focuses on urbanism, suburbanization, and colonialism in San Juan, Puerto Rico since 1930. |
 Tom
Sugrue (History: University of Pennsylvania): "Sweet
Land of Liberty: The Unfinished Struggle for Racial Equality
in the North," Friday, Feb 15.
Tom Sugrue is best known for his highly influential Origins
of the Urban Crisis (1996), which turned the racial backlash
thesis on its head.
|
 Margaret
Weir (Political Science, Berkeley): "Building Successful
Regions," Friday, April 18.
Weir is the author of Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries
of Employment Policy in the United States. She is currently
working on a study of urban inequalities, with a focus on
the politics of coalition building.
|
 Joe
McCartin (History, Georgetown):'Fire the Hell Out of Them':Sanitation
Workers' Struggles and the Normalization of the Striker Replacement
Strategy, Friday, May 2.
McCartin wrote Labor's Great War: The Struggle for Industrial
Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations,
1912-21. His current research traces the decline of organized
labor since the 1960s.
|
 Dorian
Warren (Political Science, Columbia): "Wal-Mart in Black,
White, and Urban Grey," Friday, May
9.
Warren is a student of labor, urban politics, and social inequality.
His latest project examines the fates of community/labor mobilizations
against Wal-Mart.
|
Winter 2008 |
 Linda
Gordon (History, NYU): "Dorothea Lange and Visual Democracy,"
Friday, Jan 18.
Gordon is a founder and one of the foremost practitioners
of feminist scholarship in the United States. She is the author
of Women's Body, Women's Right: The History of Birth Control
in America, among many other pioneering works.
|
  Julian Zelizer (History, Princeton) & Meg Jacobs (History,
MIT): "The Reagan Revolution Reconsidered: How Conservatives
in Office Govern," Friday, Feb 1.
Jacobs and Zelizer are joint editors of The Democratic
Experience: New Directions in American Political History (2003). |
2007 Speakers |
Fall 2007
|
 Robert O. Self (History, Brown University) "Gender and Political Culture in the Vietnam Era," Friday October 12.
Robert O. Self's book, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, won major book prizes in history and political science. His talk covers material from his forthcoming book, The Politics of Gender and Sexuality from Watts to Reagan. |
 Ruth Milkman (Sociology, UCLA) "L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement, " Friday October, 19.
Sociologist Ruth Milkman directs UCLA's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment Industrial Relations and is the author of numerous books and articles on work, gender and the labor movement. Her talk will address the past, present, and future of union activism in Los Angeles. |
 Julia Greene (History, University of Maryland) "The Thirteenth labor of Hercules: The United States, the World, and the Building of the Panama Canal, 1903-1915," Friday, November 16.
Julia Green's talk will cover research into the construction of the Panama Canal, the basis of her new work, For Empire They toil: The United States and the Building of the Panama Canal, 1904-1914. Green's research examines the intersection of empire, race, and progressive labor and politics. |
 Risa Goluboff (University of Virginia Law School) "The Lost Promise of Civil Rights," Friday, November 30.
Risa Goluboff is a legal historian who argues that the New Deal, the Cold War, and the NAACP wing of the civil rights movement redefined the meaning of civil rights, stripping it of much of its labor and economic content at the very moment of its triumph. |
Spring 2007 |
 Gary Gerstle (Vanderbilt University) "America's Peculiar State: Public Governance from the American Revolution through the New Deal," Friday, April 13.
Gary Gerstle's American Crucible: Race and the Nation in the 20th Century has reconfigured our understanding of nationalism, citizenship, and class. He is also the author of Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City. |
 Jonathan Bell (University of Reading, UK) "A Virile and Meaningful Democratic Left? Making Sense of Political Ideology in California in the Post-World War II Era," Friday, May 4.
Jonathan Bell considers the historical possibility that post-war California might well have been a laboratory for an American version of European social democracy. He is the author of The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Era. |
 Pun Ngai (University of Hong Kong) "Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace," Friday, May 18.
Pun Ngai, who worked for several months on an electronics assembly line in the Chinese export sector, is an activist in the Hong Kong workers' rights movement. She is the author of Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. |
Winter 2007 |
 Mae Ngai (Columbia University) "He Talk Lie: Chinese Interpreters in Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century America," Friday, February 2.
Mae Ngai's book, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, won six national awards and has transformed our understanding of citizenship, immigration and ethnicity. |
 Joshua Freeman (CUNY Graduate Center) "Nationalism, Communism and Labor History," Friday, February 16.
Joshua Freeman, the preeminent historian of New York labor, considers the legacy of both Communism and
anti-Communism on the U.S. labor movement in its heyday. He is the author of Working-Class New York. |
 Robin Einhorn (University of California, Berkeley) "American Taxation, American Slavery," Friday, February 23.
Robin Einhorn demonstrates that America's characteristic resistance to progressive taxation and centralized government arose not from a Jeffersonian smallholder ideology, but rather from the slaveocracy's determination to preserve its class power. |
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