Civic Labors is a collection of essays that were originally presented at a conference in 2011 to honor Shelton Stromquist, past president of the Labor and Working-Class History Association. Former students and colleagues from across the nation and beyond recognized Stromquist’s decades of research, teaching, and activism by reflecting on the complex interactions between scholars studying the working class and engaging in struggles that lie at the heart of workers’ lives and labor. In chapters both deeply personal and incisively analytical, the authors explore the opportunities, limitations, and risks of scholarly activism in the academy, the labor movement, and working-class communities.
Stromquist’s own contribution to the collection examines the roots of engaged labor studies, if not outright scholarly activism, in the work of John R. Commons and his students at the University of Wisconsin in the early twentieth century. Pioneers of the new labor history, in the 1960s and 1970s,...
