This week on HFTF, Vivian Price discusses the history of the Bracero Program in the United States. Between 1942 and 1964, this guest worker program put Mexican peasants to work on large factory farms across the country, employing at its peak some 500,000 workers a year. The trials faced by these migrant workers is the [...]
This week on HFTF, historian Bethany Moreton discusses her award winning book, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. While closely following the history of Wal-Mart, Moreton investigates how the “strange bedfellows” of free-market ideology and Christian faith became tied together in recent American life and politics. Any royalties from To [...]
This week on HFTF, associate teaching professor in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University and anthropologist, Roger Rouse, discusses the popular Disney series, Pirates of the Caribbean. In anticipation of the release of the fourth film in the series (to be released in theaters May 20) and as part of the CMU Center for [...]
This new episode of HFTF features an interview with Les Leopold on the state of the economy, the labor movement, the left in American politics in the current moment. He discusses the job crisis and financial deregulation, but also raises difficult questions about the responses of labor unions, and left to these developments. Leopold is [...]
This episode of HFTF features an interview with noted historian Nell Irvin Painter on her new book, The History of White People (2010). Painter is professor emerita at Princeton University, past president of the Organization of American Historians, and the author of a number of other works in American history, including, Standing at Armageddon: The [...]
The efforts to undermine the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers in Wisconsin led by Republican Governor Scott Walker – and the widespread resistance of unions, workers, and supporters – represents, perhaps, the most important domestic political issue in the United States at the moment. But where did the public sector labor movement come [...]
This new episode of HFTF features an interview with Jefferson Cowie, associate professor of labor history at Cornell University, and author of Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor, and just this September, of Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. Cowie’s latest book is a fascinating look into [...]
This week on HFTF historian David R. Roediger discusses the history of race and “whiteness” in America. The author of several books on labor, race, and power, including The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, and most recently, How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the [...]
This week on History for the Future, I interviewed Heather Steffen on the structure of the labor force at American universities. We discussed the increasing use of the casual labor of adjunct teachers, the crisis in the tenure system, and highly exploitative world of student internships. Steffen pointed to the ways that recent changes in [...]
This week on History for the Future, I interview John Soluri, associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, and author of the book Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environment in Honduras and the United States (2005). Soluri describes the development of the “commodity chain” that has linked the lowland banana producing region of Honduras [...]