The conference on February 11–12 brought together scholars working on labor and capital in U.S. history for virtual panels. Don’t worry if you missed it, you can now stream or download recordings!
Recordings for the whole conference can be accessed here.
For more information and podcast/download links, click here to go to the conference site.
Conference Program
Schedule (all of the times are given in Central European Time):
Friday, February 11, 2022
11:00–11:30 Conference Opening
11:30–13:00 Panel I: Normalizing Neoliberalism
13:00–14:00 Break
14:00–15:00 Gather I: Doctoral Poster Presentation and Organization Presentation
15:00–16:30 Panel II: Socialism and Marxism
16:30–17:15 Break
17:15–18:30 Keynote I, David Roediger “Is the US a Middle Class Nation? Past and Present”
Saturday, February 12, 2022
9:30–10:00 Welcome and Housekeeping
10:00–11:30 Roundtable: Natalie Rauscher, Axel Jansen, Jan Logemann, Dirk Hoerder
11:30–13:00 Panel III: Internationalism, Transnationalism, and Empire
13:00–14:00 Break
14:00–15:00 Gather II: Doctoral Poster Presentation and Organization Presentation
15:00–17:00 Panel IV: Labor Law and Labor Rights
17:00–17:15 Break
17:15–18:30 Keynote II, Elizabeth Faue, “Fighting for It Under a Different Name’: Collaboration and Conflict, Labor and the New Social Movements”
18:30–20:00 Business Meeting (DGfA/GAAS members only)
The transnational turn has introduced significant new perspectives on the history of labor and capitalism in the United States. While the state remains an important object of analysis, decentering the nation in labor history provides additional lenses that focus on circulations, interactions, and connections below or beyond the nation-state. According to Ian Tyrell, they focus attention on exchanges across national boundaries, the impact of asymmetrical power exerted by one nation, and networks of relations not contained by nation-states. In questioning a coherent, all-encompassing national narrative, the voices and visions of people and groups who have been marginalized in the context of a nationalist myopia are reclaimed.
The experiences of non-citizens and migrants, labor sojourners and “birds of passage,” inhabitants of border regions, workers of international corporations, and new digital and remote workers help provide a more complete and more complex picture of what both labor and capital have meant in various historical contexts. Negotiations of labor rights, property rights, the rights of capital or corporate personship from the emergent nation-state to globalization accounts for different appraisals of labor heroes or radicals, benevolent tycoons or robber barons. Historians such as Kiran Klaus Patel, for example, root the history of the New Deal in a global context, connecting the history of labor and capital to that of U.S. hegemony in the twentieth century. Others, such as Julie Greene, connect the immigrant experience with American empire. Likewise, Donna Gabaccia focuses on the migration world of Italian workers, and Mae Ngai traces the role of “impossible” illegal immigrant workers in the making of America.