Department of History

Departmental

Working Class Series

Monday, March 18, 2024

This talk will discuss the history of deep reform in US history, showing the relationships among social movements and the necessity and operation of divisions in the ruling class. Zweig will explore case studies from Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the modern civil rights movement to help guide us in understanding and shaping the relation between social movements and electoral politics in the pursuit of deep systemic reform in this period.

About the Speaker

Working Class Seminar

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Our guest speaker will be Alice Lynd, a legendary activist in the post WWII era in the United States, a veteran of anti-war, civil rights, labor, and anti-death penalty campaigns. Over seven decades, Alice and her late husband Staughton Lynd (1929-2022) developed a theory and practice, derived from Latin American Liberation Theology in the 1980s, about how to work with movements from below in democratic and egalitarian ways. Alice will summarize this work in a conversation with Marcus Rediker, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh. 

Working-Class History Seminar Series

Thursday, January 25, 2024

The Alice and Staughton Lynd Working Class History Seminar invites faculty, staff, students, and community members to attend a discussion with Robin J. Sowards on the past, present, and future of academic unions. As a lead organizer for the Union for Pitt Faculty campaign as well as other academic unionization efforts, Sowards brings first-hand experience alongside history, theory, and strategy to a discussion of industrial unionism within labor organizing in higher education.

Dr. Yevan Terrien awarded Herbert G. Gutman Prize for Outstanding Dissertation

Congratulations to our former doctoral student, Dr. Terrien, who was awarded the Herbert G. Gutman Prize for Outstanding Dissertation by the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA). Dr. Terrien's dissertation, entitled "Exiles and Fugitives: Labor, Mobility, and Power in French Colonial Louisiana, 1699-1769", was supervised by Dr. Marcus Rediker. For more information, please click here.