20 November
The development of the field of labor and working-class history into an area of strength for the University of Iowa began toward the end of the nineteenth century. This process was defined by involvement from public institutions, such as the UI Libraries and State Historical Society, that collected and stored materials for research, and by the presence of scholars who devoted their careers to studying, teaching, and publishing works in the field.
As early as 1859, the UI Libraries began obtaining free copies of federal and state government publications, showing that despite budget limitation, it was important to house materials that were useful for labor and working-class historians. In the 1870s when their budget increased, so too did their acquisition of other materials that were valuable for historical research. Over the course of the following decades, librarians continued to focus on adding materials on labor and working-class history to the collection, including ones that intersect with women’s history, since those have long been active teaching and research fields at Iowa.
Early twentieth century course offerings from the history department, included “Socialism and Social Legislation” and “Industrial History of the U.S.” (offered 1906-1913), “Trade Unionism” (1916-1923), and “Social and Economic Reform Movements” (1928-1935). However, the field of labor and working-class history experienced a slump at the University of Iowa at the end of the 1920s. Aside from a few classes related to the subject and several MA theses, accord to John Shacht, “labor history was to receive no further serious attention from the History Department faculty or students until the 1960s.” The main culprit was Depression-era budget cuts, which led the department to prioritize teaching more popular and conventional historical topics in order to keep the program afloat.
Labor and working-class history began its comeback at the University of Iowa in the early 1940s, and the field proved popular with graduate students throughout the 1950s. This eventually led the department to seek out new faculty members, such as Harry E. Graham (PhD Wisconsin, 1967) and Anthony V. Sinicropi (PhD Iowa, 1968) who helped to bring the subject back to the forefront. One important result of this time period was the Communications Workers of America – University of Iowa Oral History Project, which was conducted from 1968 to 1972 and yielded eighty-nine tape-recorded interviews (transcribed on some 3,000 pages of text) with people who helped build telephone unionism across the country.
By 1970, there were many graduate students in the department who were interested in the history of working people. As was the case for students of history across the United States, their interest had been sparked by the social movements of the 1960s, and they were motivated to learn more about the inequalities and tensions which the movements had brought to light. Still, Iowa’s approach to labor and working-class history differed from broader national trends. Instead of focusing on the daily lives of the working class, researchers at Iowa tended to focus on institutions, organizations, and unions; this was due in large part to the fact that the manuscripts, oral histories, and archival materials that were locally available to historians at Iowa lent themselves more readily to institutional history. Further, much of the best-known scholarship in the field at the time was institutionalist in nature.
During the 1980s, working-class history finally asserted itself fully at the University of Iowa. Faculty members like Shelton Stromquist, who was involved in the civil rights movement and who wrote extensively on the struggles faced by railroad workers in the nineteenth century, helped to push the field forward. So too did the introduction of courses such as “American Social History, 1877-1920,” and a two-semester sequence of labor and working-class courses taught by Stromquist. At the same time, the State Historical Society’s contributions to the Iowa Labor and History Oral Project (ILHOP) and its active role in the community also drew scholars who were interested in labor and working-class history topics. Today, ILHOP is recognized as “a model for long-standing university-community engagement and as one of the most comprehensive state-level oral history collections in the world.”
More recently, study of labor and working-class history has tended to intersect with other departments, such as gender and women’s studies, sociology, or political science. This interest in the subject and overlap with other departments is attributed to traits including the high quality of Iowa’s faculty, a tradition of religious and ideological tolerance and diversity, proximity of an activist State Historical Society, the broad array of academic programs and services, and the support of service units like the library whose staff has worked with labor and working-class historians to build a supportive collection.
This tradition continues today with the work of former graduate students and current faculty members. Among these faculty members are Colin Gordon, whose research interests include twentieth century U.S. history with an emphasis on public policy, political economy, and urban history; Ashley Howard, who studies the roles of race, class, gender, and region in defining resistance to racialized oppression; and Landon Storrs, whose expertise lies in twentieth century political history through the lenses of women’s history, social movements, and social policy. As a collective, historians who are connected to the University of Iowa continue to make their mark on labor and working-class history, even as the field evolves around them.
John Shacht, Labor and Working Class History at Iowa Pt1
John Shacht, Labor and Working Class History at Iowa Pt2
Iowa Labory History Oral Project (ILHOP) Homepage