Shelton Stromquist (born 1943) is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Iowa and a former president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association. [1] [2] A social and labor historian, Stromquist's research examines an array of topics that include nineteenth century labor movements in the United States, [3] labor union politics during the Cold War, [4] and workers' struggles for municipal socialism across the world. [5]
Stromquist graduated from Yale University with a history major in 1966 and earned a PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in 1981, writing a dissertation under the supervision of David Montgomery. [6]
Stromquist was an active participant in the United States civil rights movement. Having first enrolled as an undergraduate at Yale University, Stromquist dropped out in 1963, traveling to India with the Experiment in International Living and studying and working in Germany from 1963 to 1964. He returned to work with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee as a volunteer, helping to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and register African-Americans to vote in Vicksburg, Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964. He returned to Vicksburg during the summer of 1965 to continue that work and after graduating in 1966, joined the "Meredith March" in Mississippi from near Greenwood to the outskirts of Jackson. From 1966 to 1968 he served as a volunteer in Tanzania, East Africa with the American Friends Service Committee, working in Ujamaa (African socialist) villages. He married Ann Mullin, another AFSC volunteer, in Tanzania. They have three children, Christopher (1973), Matthew (1975) and Elizabeth (1979) (deceased). Stromquist was also active in the antiwar movement in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from 1968 to 1971, first as a staff person with AFSC and then as a community organizer and volunteer with Casa Maria and the Catholic Worker movement. [7]
The Knights of Labor, officially the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, was an American labor federation that was active in the late 19th century, especially the 1880s. It operated in the United States as well in Canada, and had chapters also in Great Britain and Australia. Its most important leader was Terence V. Powderly. The Knights of Labor promoted the social and cultural uplift of the worker, and demanded the eight-hour day. In some cases it acted as a labor union, negotiating with employers, but it was never well organized or funded. It was notable in its ambition to organize across lines of gender and race and in the inclusion of both skilled and unskilled labor. After a rapid expansion in the mid-1880s, it suddenly lost its new members and became a small operation again. The Knights of Labor had served, however, as the first mass organization of the white working class of the United States.
The Midwestern United States is one of the four census regions defined by the United States Census Bureau. It occupies the northern central part of the United States. It was officially named the North Central Region by the U.S. Census Bureau until 1984. It is between the Northeastern United States and the Western United States, with Canada to the north and the Southern United States to the south.
The Pullman Strike was two interrelated strikes in 1894 that shaped national labor policy in the United States during a period of deep economic depression. First came a strike by the American Railway Union (ARU) against the Pullman factory in Chicago in spring 1894. When it failed, the ARU launched a national boycott against all trains that carried Pullman passenger cars. The nationwide railroad boycott that lasted from May 11 to July 20, 1894, was a turning point for US labor law. It pitted the American Railway Union (ARU) against the Pullman Company, the main railroads, the main labor unions, and the federal government of the United States under President Grover Cleveland. The strike and boycott shut down much of the nation's freight and passenger traffic west of Detroit, Michigan. The conflict began in Chicago, on May 11 when nearly 4,000 factory employees of the Pullman Company began a wildcat strike in response to recent reductions in wages. Most of the factory workers who built Pullman cars lived in the "company town" of Pullman just outside of Chicago. Pullman was designed as a model community by its namesake founder and owner George Pullman. Jennie Curtis who lived in Pullman was president of seamstress union ARU LOCAL 269 gave a speech at the ARU convention urging people to strike.
The Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) is a labor organization in the United States and Canada that represents employees in the public transit industry. Established in 1892 as the Amalgamated Association of Street Railway Employees of America, the union was centered primarily in the Eastern United States; today, ATU has over 200,000 members throughout the United States and Canada.
Native Americans in the United States have resided in what is now Iowa for thousands of years. The written history of Iowa begins with the proto-historic accounts of Native Americans by explorers such as Marquette and Joliet in the 1680s. Until the early 19th century Iowa was occupied exclusively by Native Americans and a few European traders, with loose political control by France and Spain.
Producerism is an ideology which holds that those members of society engaged in the production of tangible wealth are of greater benefit to society than, for example, aristocrats who inherit their wealth and status.
The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) was a coalition of the major Civil Rights Movement organizations operating in Mississippi. COFO was formed in 1961 to coordinate and unite voter registration and other civil rights activities in the state and oversee the distribution of funds from the Voter Education Project. It was instrumental in forming the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. COFO member organizations included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Melvyn Dubofsky is professor emeritus of history and sociology, and a well-known labor historian. He is Bartle Distinguished Professor of History and Sociology at the Binghamton University.
The Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA) is a non-profit association of academics, educators, students, and labor movement and other activists that promotes research into and publication of materials on the history of the labor movement in North and South America. Its current president is James Gregory, professor of history at University of Washington.
Richard Schneirov is a Professor Emeritus of history and noted labor historian at Indiana State University.
George Boardman Boomer was a Union Army colonel who served as a brigade commander between February 12, 1863, and May 22, 1863, during the American Civil War. His principal service was during the heavy engagement of his brigade on May 16, 1863, at the Battle of Champion Hill during the Vicksburg campaign and in the second assault on Vicksburg on May 22, 1863. Colonel Boomer was killed near the Railroad Redoubt on the second day of major assaults on the City of Vicksburg on May 22, 1863.
The railroad brotherhoods are labor unions of railroad workers in the United States. They first appeared in 1863 and they are still active. Until recent years they were largely independent of each other and of the American Federation of Labor.
Paul Grottkau (1846–1898) was a German-American socialist political activist and newspaper publisher. Grottkau is best remembered as an editor alongside Haymarket affair victim August Spies of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, one of the leading American radical newspapers of the decade of the 1880s. Later moving to Milwaukee, Grottkau became one of the leading luminaries of the socialist movement in Wisconsin.
Simon Philip Van Patten (1852–1918) was an American socialist political activist prominent during the latter half of the 1870s and the first half of the 1880s. Van Patten is best remembered for being named the first Corresponding Secretary of the Workingmen's Party of the United States in 1876 and for heading it and its successor organization, the Socialist Labor Party of America, for the next six years. In 1883 Van Patten mysteriously disappeared, with his friends reporting him as a potential suicide to law enforcement authorities. He later turned up as a government employee, however, having abandoned radical politics in favor of stable employment.
Martha Lena Morrow Lewis (1868–1950) 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 following works deal with the cultural, political, economic, military, biographical and geologic history of the Midwestern United States.
Eric Arnesen is an American historian. He is currently the James R. Hoffa Professor of Modern American Labor History at George Washington University. He was a Fulbright Scholar, and is a member of the Organization of American Historians.
The Brakemen's Brotherhood was an early American railroad brotherhood established in 1873. The group was a secret society organizing railroad brakemen into a fraternal benefit society and trade union. The organization was largely destroyed in the aftermath of the failed Great Railroad Strike of 1877, although it continued to maintain an existence nationwide through the 1880s.
The Wisconsin Labor History Society (WLHS), founded in 1980, is a non-profit association, based in Milwaukee, to research and inform academics, workers, and general public on the labor history in the US state of Wisconsin. It commemorates the Bay View Tragedy of May 5, 1886, when state militia opened fire and killed eight of 1,500 workers marching during a national strike for an 8-hour work-day.
The Mississippi River was an important military highway that bordered ten states, roughly equally divided between Union and Confederate loyalties.