On this week’s Labor History Today:  While historians have written prolifically about the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, there has been a lack of attention to the Columbine Massacre in which police shot and killed six striking coal miners and wounded sixty more protestors during the 1927–1928 Colorado Coal Strike, even though its aftermath exerted far more influence on subsequent national labor policies.

Our colleague Robert Lindgren, who hosts the Labor Exchange radio show on KGNU, Boulder, Denver, and Fort Collins, recently released a 3-part interview with Campbell-Hale; on today’s show, Part 1. Click here for Part 2 and here for Part 3.

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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On this week’s Labor History Today: Battle of the Eureka Stockade. Australia’s history closely tracks American history; the subjugation of indigenous people is the most obvious parallel, and the battles for basic worker rights is another. On today’s show -- which comes to us from Stick Together, Australia's only national radio show focusing on industrial, social and workplace issues -- the Battle of the Eureka Stockade, the first major event of post-colonial Australia, where in 1854, during the Victorian gold rush, the army and police violently attacked miners – killing dozens -- for daring to call for the end of mining licenses and universal suffrage.

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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American labor unions have seen an incredible resurgence in recent years, which, suggests public historian Tom Goldscheider, “begs the question: why were they in decline in the first place?”

Tom Goldscheider is a public historian and working farrier based in western Massachusetts. His research on Greenfield labor history was published in the Historical Journal of Massachusetts and shared through a series of talks given at area venues. He has also published and spoken on the origins and significance of Shays’ Rebellion, and developed an interactive curriculum on local abolitionist history for the David Ruggles Center for History and Education. He holds a Masters in History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Reach him at [email protected]

Ian Coss is a creator of acclaimed podcasts. His nine-part documentary The Big Dig was named one of the best podcasts of 2023 by The New Yorker and Vulture, while spending over six weeks in the top 100 shows on Apple Podcasts; it’s really terrific and worth a listen.

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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Joe Jencks is a 25-year veteran of the international folk circuit, an award-winning songwriter, and a celebrated vocalist based in Chicago. Merging conservatory training with his Irish roots and working-class upbringing, Joe delivers engaged musical narratives filled with heart, soul, groove and grit. Pete Seeger said “The spirit of Folk music is people working together. Joe is a fantastic singer who carries on the traditions.”

Today, Joe tells us the story behind his song “Christmas in Mansfield,” where Armco locked out 620 steel workers on September 1, 1999.

A note from LHT host Chris Garlock: Labor History Today is brought to you by the Labor Heritage Foundation, which works to preserve labor culture and history. If you want to support our work, please consider contributing to LHF; it’s tax deductible and right now all contributions are being matched. Click here to give; thank you!

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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“This fight isn't just for the teamsters. This is for all American workers.”

But that quote at the top is not from the Amazon strike; it’s about the Teamsters’ strike against the United Parcel Service in 1997.

On this week’s Labor History in Two: The Bucks Stove Boycott.

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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On this week's Labor History Today: Touring the American Labor Museum

And, on Labor History in Two: The year was 2005; that was the day the labor movement lost a man who was willing to go to jail to fight for the rights of working people.   

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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On this week's Labor History Today: Decades before Miami became Havana USA, a wave of leftist, radical, working-class women and men from prerevolutionary Cuba crossed the Florida Straits, made Ybor City the global capital of the Cuban cigar industry, and established the foundation of latinidad in the Sunshine State. Located on the eastern edge of Tampa, Ybor City was a neighborhood of cigar workers and Caribbean revolutionaries who sought refuge against the shifting tides of international political turmoil during the early half of the twentieth century.

Producer Patrick Dixon talks with historian Sarah McNamara about her book Ybor City, Crucible of the Latina South, which tells the story of immigrant and U.S.-born Latinas and Latinos who organized strikes, marched against fascism, and criticized U.S. foreign policy. While many members of the immigrant generation maintained their dedication to progressive ideals for years to come, those who came of age in the wake of World War II distanced themselves from leftist politics amidst the Red Scare and the wrecking ball of urban renewal.

This portrait of the political shifts that defined Ybor City highlights the underexplored role of women’s leadership within movements for social and economic justice as it illustrates how people, places, and politics become who and what they are.

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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Dr. Jay Cephas considers two Depression-era murals in Detroit and their contrasting messaging about workers, labor, and power. Diego Rivera’s famed Detroit Industry murals (top), commissioned by Edsel Ford for the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1932, champions industrial and technological progress and the factory workers who fueled it. In contrast, Walter Speck and Barbara Wilson’s 1937 untitled mural (bottom), which originally hung in the UAW Local 174 union hall and now hangs behind the reference desk at the Reuther Library, champions the progress those industrial workers made laboring for their own welfare via union action.

Dr. Cephas is Assistant Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. His essay “Detroit Industry and ‘The Mural’: Representing Labor and Reappropriating Care in the Museum and in the Union Hall,” was published in the 2023 volume, Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Common.

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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Five stunning paintings depicting labor organizing, pickets and the violence directed at workers in the turbulent 1930s were almost lost to history. The story of Philip Tipperman and how a small group of people saved those paintings.

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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Picketed, Beaten, by Philip Tipperman, 1939

Labor historian Mitch Troutman’s 2022 book, The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry, 1925-1942 is a detailed account of coal bootlegging in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania in the Prohibition/Depression decades when unemployed miners took over unused mines,

Questions, comments, or suggestions are welcome, and to find out how you can be a part of Labor History Today, email us at [email protected]

Labor History Today is produced by the Labor Heritage Foundation and the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor.

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