In the wake of the 1877 railroad strike, the journalist James Dacus imagined the workers that propelled the protest as “mighty masses of strange, grimy men, excited by passions, dark and fearful, surging along the streets.” Diverging from this gothic vision, a Christian Union reporter noted that the strikers were “thoroughly organized, and generally were orderly in their movements…they did not destroy property; in many instances they organized to protect it.” Figuring workers as “strange” and “fearful,” or “orderly” and “organized,” these accounts point to the tensions and contradictions shaping the popular representation of the working classes in an era that saw drastic economic instability, wide scale labor organization, and violent social conflict.

This panel will address the divergent ways that the U.S. popular press imagined workers, industrial work, and labor movements during and after the Civil War, as class conflict and the conditions of proletarian life took on new importance in the public imagination. In keeping with the theme of the 2007 NCSA conference, “Politics and Propaganda,” we are seeking papers that consider the political work of the representations of workers, labor, and activism that appeared in American newspaper journalism, sensational pamphlets, serialized fiction, reformist essays and editorials, illustrated magazines, photography, chromolithographs, and cartoons—among other popular print venues.

As James Dacus’s vision of “dark” and “grimy men” suggests, postbellum representations of workers were invariably racialized and gendered constructions; accordingly, papers that address the racial and gender politics of the figure of the laborer are especially welcome.

For complete conference information, please visit
http://www.english.uwosh.edu/roth/ncsa.

Please email an abstract (250 words) and a one-page c.v. by September 15 to sari@brandeis.edu, rcb@bu.edu.