Social Justice and Working People’s Struggles in the United States and Beyond
Since the 1980s I have researched and written about US labor, women’s, and working-class history through a lens of race and ethnicity and of transnational capitalism. I’ve also written about the politics of “Buy American” campaigns and anti-Asian racism and explored the cultural politics of local monuments. I have a new book, What Can We Learn From the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times, out from Beacon Press.
Books:
What Can We Learn From the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times, Beacon Press, 2024.
Women Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big: The 1937 Detroit Woolworth’s Strike, reprint of essay in Three Strikes, with a new interview with the author and introduction by Todd Chretien, Haymarket Books, 2012.
Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California’s Kitsch Monuments, City Lights Books, 2007.
Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century, with Howard Zinn and Robin D.G. Kelley, Beacon Press, 2001.
Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism, Beacon Press, 1999.
Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Articles in the Popular Press:
“In Rebuilding Big Basin, Which History Do We Want to Remember?,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 30, 2020.
“Congresswomen of Color Have Always Fought Back Against Sexism,” Washington Post, July 29, 2020.
“Our History Shows There’s a Dark Side to ‘Buy American’,” Washington Post, January 29, 2017.
“David Montgomery, Grand Master Workman,” The Nation.com, December 19, 2011.
“Once They Started, Sit-Downs Spread Like Wildfire,” Labor Notes #364, July 2009, pp. 5, 14.
“UC Service Workers Deserve Livable Wages,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 17, 2008.
“Our Fruit, Their Labor, and Global Reality,” Washington Post, Sunday Outlook section, June 2, 2002.
“From Woolworth’s to the WTO,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 2, 2001.
“I Mille Volti Di Una Lunga Marcia,” Il Manifesto (Rome, Italy), January 2, 2000(translated into Italian by Marina Impallomeni); reprinted in English in AFT Perspectives as “The Revolution in Seattle?” March/April 2000.
“The Free Trade-Off,” San Jose Mercury News, Sept. 5, 1999.
“Is This a Cause We Should Rally Around? Not Exactly,” Washington Post Outlook Section, July 4, 1999.
Selected Articles in Scholarly Publications:
“Where Is the History of U.S. Labor and International Solidarity? Part I: A Moveable Feast,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Vol. I, No. 1 (March 2004), pp. 95-119.
“Where Are the Workers in Consumer-Worker Alliances? Class Dynamics and the History of Consumer-Labor Campaigns,” Politics and Society, Vol. 31, No. 3 (September 2003), pp. 363-37.
“Demons in the Parking Lot: Auto Workers and the ‘Japanese Threat’ in the 1980s,” Amerasia Journal, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2002), pp. 33-50.
“White Working-Class Women and the Race Question,” International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 54 (Fall 1998), pp. 80-102.
“Race Relations and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1915-1929,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Winter 1994/95), pp. 35-44.
“’Food Wins All Struggles:’ Seattle Labor and the Politicization of Consumption, 1919-1929,” Radical History Review No. 51 (September, 1991), pp. 65-89.
“Gender, Consumer Organizing, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929,” in Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward A New Labor History (Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 273-95.
“Housewives, Socialists, and the Politics of Food: The 1917 New York Cost-of-Living Protests,” Feminist Studies Vol. 11 No. 2 (Summer 1985), 355-385.