Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item “LABOR HAS A LONG MEMORY”: TRANSFORMATIONS IN CAPITALISM AND LABOR ORGANIZING IN CENTRAL APPALACHIA, 1977-2019(2019) Heim, David; Freund, David; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1989 the UMWA went on strike against Pittston Coal. In response to declining union power and corporate anti-unionism, the UMWA embraced community members and women as participants in its striking strategy. Although sometimes reluctant to do so, the union accepted the involvement of non-miners in non-violent demonstrations and civil disobedience, and was successful because of the strategic shift. The victory against Pittston Coal in 1989 suggests that scholars cannot rule industrial unions as sites of resistance to capitalism after 1982. The union’s acceptance of community organizing in 1989 also suggests a link between the strategies and success of the Pittston Strike and more recent organizing victories in West Virginia—the West Virginia Teachers’ Strikes. More recent labor militancy in Appalachia has also built off of legacies of resistance dating back to events like the Paint Creek Mine War and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1912 and 1921.Item MIGRATION, MODERNITY AND MEMORY: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IN A NORTHEAST PENNSYLVANIA COAL COMPANY TOWN, 1897-2014(2015) Roller, Michael Peter; Shackel, Paul A; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Lattimer Massacre occurred in September of 1897 in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania. It has been described as the bloodiest massacre of the nineteenth century. In this event, a company-sponsored sheriff and a posse of local businessmen shot into a crowd of striking Eastern European mine laborers, resulting in the deaths of at least nineteen. However, the great significance of the event is not in the body count but the material contexts of its occurrence as well as its pre- and post- histories. Moreover, while the event can be securely consigned to history, the capitalist processes punctuated by this instance of violence are present throughout the century since its occurrence. In the region, coal company towns materialized carefully maintained racialized labor hierarchies in which new immigrants were confined to shanty towns at the periphery. The dissertation operates on an archaeological scale stretched across the longue durée of the twentieth century, documenting the transformation of a shanty town into an American suburb over the course of a century. The archaeological evidence hails from three excavations including a survey of the site of the Massacre and excavations of lots in the shanty enclave. This dissertation examines the trajectory of these settlements across the entire span of the twentieth century. With its primary evidence derived from waste, ruins, surpluses and redundancies accumulated over time, archaeological tellings of history recognize these aspects not simply for their contingency, but their centrality within capitalist social life across the passage of time. In this dissertation, I propose that a critical historical archaeology can contribute substantially to a nuanced understanding of the ironic developments of late twentieth century political economy. Contradiction, sovereignty, governmentality, states of exception, surplus enjoyment, cycles of creative destruction and reterritorialization, renewal, and subjectivation are explored by juxtaposing, grafting and merging archaeological evidence with social theory, textual evidence, ethnographic data and interdisciplinary scholarship to present an archaeological history greater than the sum of its parts. The result is both a history of the community and a schematic for an archaeological history of the twentieth century.Item "Against the Public": Teacher Strikes and the Decline of Liberalism, 1968-1981(2013) Shelton, Jon K.; Greene, Julie; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the 1930s, the Democratic Party became the party of working people largely through its support of legislation encouraging the formation of labor unions. As the nation moved leftward, a liberal consensus emerged that placed support--in the name of both economic growth and greater social equality--for labor unions at it center. Support for this labor-liberalism declined considerably during the 1970s, paving the way for the neoliberal conservatism that has emerged in the last quarter century of American politics. This dissertation explains this shift by looking at the intersection between culture and the public sector labor movement in the postwar era. As unionized teachers became increasingly visible in American political culture in the 1960s, lengthy strikes by teachers in major metropolitan areas in the 1970s caused many Americans to question their assumptions about the role of the state and the importance of labor unions. Because of teachers' long-time cultural importance as providers of economic opportunity as well as inculcators of moral values, their labor stoppages (which were often violations of the law) caused many white working- and middle-class Americans to blame the excesses of the liberal state for moral decline and to re-think their views about what had made America so prosperous in the years following World War II. Further, the state's failure to solve the thorny problem of teachers shutting down the school system also caused many of these future "Reagan Democrats" to question the efficacy of the liberal state. With labor-liberalism discredited, free-market conservatives began, by the end of the decade, to argue persuasively for a shift to a more austere state, less government regulation of business, and for the privatization of social goods like education. This dissertation charts these larger developments by putting close examinations of teacher strikes in Newark, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and St. Louis in dialogue with the national trajectory of neoliberal conservatism.