[On May 4th,
1886, a labor protest and rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in support of
a
nationwide strike turned into a confusing, bloody mess. So this week I’ve
AmericanStudied a handful of contexts for the Haymarket
Affair, leading up to this special weekend post on one of our most
important current scholarly voices on labor.]
On three ways to
read the vital voice of labor historian and professor Erik Loomis.
1)
Lawyers,
Guns, & Money: I first encountered Erik’s work through the LGM blog, for
which he’s written countless
important posts (including the ongoing “This
Day in Labor History” series) for many years now. LGM has been a model of a
community of academics engaging with public issues and conversations since its May 2004 founding, and
remains one of the best (and ever-more necessary) such spaces in 2018.
2)
His Books: Erik has published two
ground-breaking books and has at least two more in progress, and among other
things they model a back-and-forth between more academic and more public styles
and audiences. His first book, Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing
Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe (2015), was more publicly
oriented; his second, Empire
of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests (2016), more
academic. He’s now at work on a similar pair: the publicly focused No
Retreat, No Surrender: American History in Ten Strikes; and the
academically oriented Soil and Steel: The
New Deal Roots of Labor-Environmental Coalitions. I can’t recommend his
first two highly enough, and greatly look forward to this next pair!
3)
His Public Scholarly Presence: I know about
those works in progress primarily because of Erik’s public scholarly online and
social media presences: on Twitter
and and on Facebook, for
example, where Erik both traces his own evolving work and career and responds thoughtfully
yet sarcastically (both entirely warranted responses, of course) to the world
around us. He also recently co-authored an excellent op
ed for the Washington Post, one
more step in his path to digital domination. Online and otherwise, when it
comes to the kinds of labor histories about which I wrote this week (among many
other subjects), there’s no one we should all be reading and learning from more
than Erik.
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. Other
scholarly voices or works you’d highlight?
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