Mike Konopacki (born c. 1951) is an American political cartoonist from Wisconsin, specializing in labor issues.
Mike Konopacki (born c. 1951) is an American political cartoonist from Wisconsin, specializing in labor issues.
A 1974 graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison (B.A. in political science [1] ), Konopacki began cartooning for the Madison Press Connection in 1977, as the successor to Pete Wagner. Konopacki's Press Connection cartoon originals are archived at the Wisconsin State Historical Society.
After the Connection went bankrupt in 1980, Konopacki began syndicating his work through the labor news service Press Associates, Inc. In 1983 he and Gary Huck (a cartoonist for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America) created their own syndication service, Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons. Huck and Konopacki have published six collections of cartoons: Bye! American, THEM, MAD in USA, Working Class Hero, Two Headed Space Alien Shrinks Labor Movement and American Dread. [2]
The business records of the early years of the partnership are archived in the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library's Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. [3]
Konopacki has created comics on a number of topics, including union organizing, welfare reform, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, often in collaboration with writer Alec Dubro. He animated the 1998 video Global Village or Global Pillage, narrated by Ed Asner. [4] In 2005, Konopacki illustrated the section, "Wobblies in the '60s" in Wobblies!: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World. [5] In collaboration with Howard Zinn and historian Paul Buhle, he co-wrote and illustrated A People's History of American Empire , a graphic novel adaptation of Zinn's A People's History of the United States [6]
Konopacki lives in Madison, Wisconsin. [7] He has earned his M.A. (2009) and M.F.A. (2010) degrees from UW-Madison's School of Art. [8] His MFA exhibit was titled, One Nation Under God. [9]
Joe Hill, born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund and also known as Joseph Hillström, was a Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World. A native Swedish speaker, he learned English during the early 1900s, while working various jobs from New York to San Francisco. Hill, an immigrant worker frequently facing unemployment and underemployment, became a popular songwriter and cartoonist for the union. His most famous songs include "The Preacher and the Slave", "The Tramp", "There Is Power in a Union", "The Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab", which express the harsh and combative life of itinerant workers, and call for workers to organize their efforts to improve working conditions.
The Communications Workers of America (CWA) is the largest communications and media labor union in the United States, representing about 700,000 members in both the private and public sectors. The union has 27 locals in Canada via CWA-SCA Canada representing about 8,000 members. CWA has several affiliated subsidiary labor unions bringing total membership to over 700,000. CWA is headquartered in Washington, DC, and affiliated with the AFL-CIO, the Strategic Organizing Center the Canadian Labour Congress, and UNI Global Union. The current president is Chris Shelton.
The Daily Worker was a newspaper published in New York City by the Communist Party USA, a formerly Comintern-affiliated organization. Publication began in 1924. While it generally reflected the prevailing views of the party, attempts were made to reflect a broader spectrum of left-wing opinion. At its peak, the newspaper achieved a circulation of 35,000. Contributors to its pages included Robert Minor and Fred Ellis (cartoonists), Lester Rodney, David Karr, Richard Wright, John L. Spivak, Peter Fryer, Woody Guthrie and Louis F. Budenz.
The Rand School of Social Science was formed in 1906 in New York City by adherents of the Socialist Party of America. The school aimed to provide a broad education to workers, imparting a politicizing class-consciousness, and additionally served as a research bureau, a publisher, and the operator of a summer camp for socialist and trade union activists.
The Tamiment Library is a research library at New York University that documents radical and left history, with strengths in the histories of communism, socialism, anarchism, the New Left, the Civil Rights Movement, and utopian experiments. The Robert F. Wagner Archives, which is also housed in Bobst Library at NYU, documents American labor history. Together the two units form an important center for scholarly research on labor and the left.
The Liberator was a monthly socialist magazine established by Max Eastman and his sister Crystal Eastman in 1918 to continue the work of The Masses, which was shut down by the wartime mailing regulations of the U.S. government. Intensely political, the magazine included copious quantities of art, poetry, and fiction along with political reporting and commentary. The publication was an organ of the Communist Party of America (CPA) from late 1922 and was merged with two other publications to form The Workers Monthly in 1924.
Jay Malcolm Kennedy was an American editor and writer. The author of The Official Underground and Newave Comix Price Guide, he was a long-time editor at King Features Syndicate, eventually rising to the position of editor-in-chief.
Pete Wagner is an American political cartoonist, activist, author, scholar and caricature artist whose work has been published in over 300 newspapers and other periodicals. His cartoons and activist theatrics have been the subject of controversy and frequent media attention.
Paul Merlyn Buhle is a (retired) Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes. He is the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James.
Jacob Burck was a Polish-born Jewish-American painter, sculptor, and award-winning editorial cartoonist. Active in the Communist movement from 1926 as a political cartoonist and muralist, Burck quit the Communist Party after a visit to the Soviet Union in 1936, deeply offended by political demands there to manipulate his work.
The American Empire Project is a book series that deals with imperialist and exceptionalist tendencies in US foreign policy in the early 21st century. The series is published by Metropolitan Books and includes contributions by such notable American thinkers and authors as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich. The project's goal is to critique what the authors consider the imperial ambitions of the United States and to explore viable alternatives for foreign policy.
Fred Wright was an American labor cartoonist and activist who created "thousands" of illustrated news strips as a staff cartoonist for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). His first published cartoon appeared in The Pilot, a publication owned by the National Maritime Union, in 1939. In 1949, the UE hired Wright as a staff cartoonist, for whom he worked until his death on December 29, 1984.
A People's History of American Empire is a 2008 graphic history by Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle. The book combines material from Zinn's history book A People's History of the United States and his autobiography You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train with new material from other sources, most notably George Lipsitz's A Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s and Jim Zwick's Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. Various historic subjects are covered as well as Zinn's own history of involvement in activism and historic events. The book was the last of Zinn's books that was published within his lifetime.
Madison Press Connection was a newspaper formed in Madison, Wisconsin in October 1977 by striking union employees from the two dominant daily newspapers, the Wisconsin State Journal and The Capital Times. The Press Connection began as a weekly but became a daily early in 1978 in an effort to intensify pressure on management of Madison Newspapers, Inc. to make concessions to the union. The Press Connection was published through early January 1980 and is available on microfilm from The State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Michael Harold "Mike" Nash (1946-2012) was an American labor historian, librarian, and archivist. Nash was the Director of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives at New York University throughout the early years of the 21st Century until the time of his death. Nash is best remembered for the key role he played in first obtaining and then integrating the archives of the Communist Party USA into Tamiment Library's holdings, in addition to other acquisition projects.
Martha Lena Morrow Lewis (1868-1950), commonly known by her middle name Lena, was an American orator, political organizer, journalist, and newspaper editor. An activist in the prohibition, women's suffrage, and socialist movements, Lewis is best remembered as a top female leader of the Socialist Party of America during that organization's heyday in the first two decades of the 20th century and as the first woman to serve on that organization's governing National Executive Committee.
The Jefferson School of Social Science was an adult education institution of the Communist Party USA located in New York City. The so-called "Jeff School" was launched in 1944 as a successor to the party's New York Workers School, albeit skewed more towards community outreach and education rather than the training of party functionaries and activists, as had been the primary mission of its predecessor. Peaking in size in 1947 and 1948 with an attendance of about 5,000, the Jefferson School was embroiled in controversy during the McCarthy period including a 1954 legal battle with the Subversive Activities Control Board over the school's refusal to register as a so-called "Communist-controlled organization."
A People's History of the United States is a 1980 nonfiction book by American historian and political scientist Howard Zinn. In the book, Zinn presented what he considered to be a different side of history from the more traditional "fundamental nationalist glorification of country". Zinn portrays a side of American history that can largely be seen as the exploitation and manipulation of the majority by rigged systems that hugely favor a small aggregate of elite rulers from across the orthodox political parties.
Samuel Adams Darcy was an American political activist who was a prominent Communist leader in both New York and California. While active in the organization of New York City's unemployment march in 1930, he was perhaps most famous for his role in the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike and support for Harry Bridges.
A strike paper, bulletin or newspaper is a news publication started by participants in a strike action.
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
| Other | |
