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.

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.

January 29 / 1 PM / HSSB 4041: Jeffrey Perry (Independent Scholar, Trade Unionist) "The Importance of Hubert Harrison (1883-1927): "The Voice of Harlem Radicalism." Dr. Jeffrey B. Perry is an independent, working class scholar who  was formally educated at Princeton, Harvard, Rutgers, and Columbia  University. He 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 (Columbia  University Press, 2008). He is also literary executor for Theodore  W. Allen and edited Allen's Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery:  The Invention of the White Race (2006).

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.

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, concerned by the hazards and inequities in modern capitalist economies, 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.

   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.

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.

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.

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.

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). 

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.

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.

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).

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