Co-Sponsored by the History Department of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northern Illinois University, and the Labor and Working Class History Association

Friday, April 7, 2006, 3:00-5:00pm
The Newberry Library

Laborism and the New Municipal Politics in Comparative Perspective, 1890-1910 Shelton Stromquist, University of Iowa

Commentators: James Epstein, Vanderbilt University and Leon Fink, University of Illinois at Chicago

The paper examines the new political energy and independence workers brought to the challenge of democratizing and refashioning the social space of cities across the industrializing world in the aftermath of the massive strikes of the late 1880s and early 1890s. Drawing on case studies from the U.S., Britain, Germany, Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand, I argue that this new grassroots politics contested with some success traditions of elite governance in cities while also posing a challenge to the centralizing and nationalizing tendencies emanating from the emerging parliamentary leadership of their own social-democratic movements.

All papers are pre-circulated. For a copy of the paper, e-mail Ginger Shulick at scholl@newberry.org, or call 312.255.3524.