Taking Labor History Public: An Overview of the Field

In January 2019, journalist Sarah Jaffe reported on the strike by United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), which brought together educators and school staff, parents, students, and community members in a massive mobilization for higher pay, smaller classes, and more school nurses. The successful work stoppage captured national attention for the broad base of support UTLA had cultivated in opposition to the forces of government austerity and privatization. Jaffe began her dispatch by recounting a standoff between teachers and a delivery driver at the picket line in front of the Harry Bridges Span School, named, she noted, after the leftist founder of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU).¹ Jaffe keenly observed how the school’s memorialization of Bridges linked radical activists of the past and present. As the picketers held the line, the crowd of supportive onlookers included a group of current ILWU members. Explaining their presence at the school, one of the longshore workers told Jaffe, “I think Harry Bridges would want us to get out and do social things, not just our work.”² This was only one episode among many during the dramatic seven-day strike, but it illuminates the generative potential and catalyzing force of public histories of workers and the communities, social movements, and labor unions to which they belong.

Today we stand between a recent past marked by waning union strength, working-class protest, and leftwing activism and a present marked by multiple streams of political mobilization driven by workers, unions, and grassroots alliances of black and brown people. Histories of labor protest, union activism, and working-class mobilization form a deep reservoir of inspiration and guidance. By taking this history public, scholars and their audiences together can foster the kind of radical historical and political consciousness capable of undergirding potent organizing struggles and resistance campaigns. As James Green argued in Taking History to Heart, which traced the convergence of labor history and public history during his distinguished career, “Historical narratives can do more than redeem the memory of past struggles; they can help people think of themselves as historical figures with crucial moral and political choices to make, like those who came before them.”³

Generations of labor historians in the United States have mined the past for lessons applicable to the political struggles of their own times. Members of the Labor and Working-Class History Association continue this tradition. Yet academic employment brings with it an obligation to publish monographs through academic presses and peer-reviewed journals that are often accessible only through paid subscriptions or organizational membership. This restricts the public reach of our scholarship. Furthermore, we almost never welcome those diverse publics into the acts of historical research, analysis, and interpretation. For labor and working-class historians, distance from nonacademic audiences carries a steep cost. First, we neglect the chance to place worker-and union-driven conflicts over political and economic power at the center of popular historical narratives. Second, we miss the opportunity to engage people who, as the saying goes, have skin in the game. In their classic study of American historical consciousness, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen examined how individuals turn to the past “to define themselves, their place in their families, and their families’ place in the world.”⁴ For labor activists and union members, this can mean translating historical scholarship into collective action. Public histories of labor can play a vital role in campaigns for workers’ rights, especially when workers partner with scholars to produce them. The field of public history presents us with a scholarly approach and a set of practices for doing this work.

This themed issue of Labor considers the benefits and challenges of producing public histories of labor. A working group sponsored by the National Council on Public History (NCPH) provided the impetus for the accompanying essays. In 2017 and 2018 guest editors Rachel Donaldson and Richard Anderson facilitated the “Public History of Labor” working group, which set out to explore ways to integrate the two fields. In developing the call for participants...