Dana Frank overlooking Monterrey Bay

Dana Frank

Historian, Professor, Writer

I am Research Professor and Professor Emerita of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a longtime historian of labor, women, and social movements in the US and beyond, always paying close attention to race and ethnicity. For many years I have also worked on human rights and US policy in Honduras, about which I have written and spoken widely in the popular media and have testified in the US Congress. In all my work, I pursue in-depth scholarly research and then write about it in forms accessible to popular audiences, in service to social justice achieved from below by working people. I also experiment with creative nonfiction.

Dana Frank Headshot

My current book, What Can We Learn From the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times, out from Beacon Press in 2024, explores the ways in which ordinary working people, in the face of economic crisis and ferocious racism, turned to collective action from below during the Great Depression. With both inspiring and sobering stories, the book is designed to speak directly to working people’s challenges today while offering a nuanced understanding of the race and gender politics of what each group did and didn’t get from the New Deal.

I am the author of seven books, including Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism; The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup; and, with Robin D.G. Kelly and Howard Zinn, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century. My work has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, Labor Notes, The Nation, The Baffler, The Jacobin, NACLA, New Left Review, The Progressive, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Politico Magazine, forthcoming in Hammer and Hope Magazine, and elsewhere, as well as in scholarly publications. I have been interviewed widely by TV, radio, and print media, including regularly on Democracy Now!

La historia es nuestra y la hacen los pueblos.
History belongs to the people, and the people make history.
–Salvador Allende, September 11, 1973