Comparitive Working-Class History
This field is designed to introduce students to a broad range of key issues in the study of workingclass history through comparative reading and discussion. Key themes include migration and class formation; gender, racial, ethnic, and class identity; work experience; labor and socialist politics; labor and authoritarianism; workingclass communities and family life. Readings reflect theoretical approaches and historiography as well as case studies and interpretation. A core problems course, focusing primarily on the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe is offered on a regular basis, usually team taught by Professors Barrett and Koenker. Professor Barrett also regularly teaches a Problems course in US Working Class history, and Professor Koenker teaches an advanced undergraduate course, also open to graduate students, on comparative European workingclass history. This course is also listed in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Labor and Industrial Relations. It is also possible to construct alternative reading lists drawing on literatures of other countries and other periods. Students in recent years have included Latin America and Africa in their preparation, as well as the United States and Western Europe.
Other campus resources include the Institute for Labor and Industrial Relations, whose institute library includes important studies in labor history as well as the leading journals in the field.
FACULTY
James R. Barrett (Ph.D., Pittsburgh,1981):
Professor Barrett specializes in U.S. and comparative workingclass history and class, race, and ethnicity in twentiethcentury U.S. social history. His current research interests focus on the social and ideological bases of labor radicalism and the mentalities of immigrant workers. Selected publications include "Unity and Fragmentation: Class, Race, and Ethnicity on Chicago's South Side, 1900-1922," Journal of Social History vol. 18 (September 1984) 3756; Work and Community in The Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922 (University of Illinois Press, 1987, paper 1990); and "Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880-1930," Journal of American History, 79 (December 1992) 996-1020.
Clare H. Crowston (Ph.D., Cornell, 1996):
Professor Crowston specializes in social and cultural history of early modern France, history of women and gender; and the history of work. Her current research focuses on women's work in early modern France and women's guilds, apprenticeship, material culture and the creation of a consumer society.
Diane P. Koenker (Ph.D., Michigan, 1976):
Professor Koenker specializes in modern Russia and Soviet Union and Russian and European workingclass history. Her current research focuses on Printers and Society in Soviet Russia, 19171930 and everyday life in the Soviet Union, l9171945. Selected publications include coauthoring with William G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton University Press, 1989); "Men Against Women on the Shop Floor in Early Soviet Russia: Gender and Class in the Socialist Workplace," American Historical Review (December 1995); and "Factory Tales: Narratives of Industrial Relations in the Transition to NEP," Russian Review (July 1996).
Kathryn J. Oberdeck (Ph.D. Yale,1991):
Professor Oberdeck specializes in U.S. cultural and intellectual history popular culture, working class culture, gender, cultural criticism and cultural studies, and social thought and social movements. Her current research focuses on religion, popular culture and class conflict in turn-of-the-century America; and popular museums. Selected publications include "'Not Pink Teas': The Working-Class Women's Movement in Seattle, 1905-1918," Labor History, 32, 2 (Spring 1991) 193-230; and "Religion, Culture, and the Politics of Class: Alexander Irvine's Mission to Turn-of-the-Century New Haven," American Quarterly, 47, 2 (June 1995) 23679.
David Roediger(Ph.D. Northwestern, 1980)
David Roediger's research interests include race and class in the United States, and the history of U.S. radicalism. Among his books are Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (with Philip S. Foner), The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the making of the American Working Class and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness. He is the editor of Fellow Worker: The Life of Fred Thompson, The North and Slavery and Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White as well as edition of Covington Hall's Labor Struggles in the Deep South. His articles have appeared in New Left Review, Against the Current, Radical History Review, History Workshop Journal, The Progressive and Tennis. Roediger is a graduate of Northern Illinois University (1975) and completed a doctorate at Northwestern (1980). His current research is on immigration and racial formation in the U.S.. Professor Roediger received his Ph. D. from Northwestern University in 1980.
Mark D. Steinberg (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1987):
Professor Steinberg is a historian of modern Russia, specializing in the cultural and social history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His research interests focus on the experiences and worldview of lowerclass Russians, the emergence of Russia's public sphere, and the development of moral, social, religious, and political ideas and values. Recent publications include Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867-1907 (University of California Press, 1992), a study of the moral and intellectual dimensions of industrial relations and lowerclass social protest in Russia before 1917; Cultures in Flux: Lower Class Values, Practices and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, (Princeton University Press, 1994), a coedited collection (with Stephen Frank of UCLA) of new essays on lowerclass cultures in lateimperial Russia; and The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (Yale University Press, 1995). He is currently completing a study, "Proletarian Imagination", that explores a number of major cultural themes (religion, modernity, the individual, morality, and culture) during the lateImperial and early Soviet years through the writings of urban lower-class Russians. He is also preparing a documentary collection and study, based on recently declassified archives, on voices of popular revolution in 1917.