Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University, 1934. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive.

This dissertation traces the rise and recent decline of the farm-raised catfish industry. From the 1960s to the 2000s, farmers and scientists reengineered the river catfish into an agro-industrial food crop. Through extensive agricultural scientific research and marketing, the farmed catfish industry changed the history of the animal, its image, its flesh and bone, its natural environment, and its place in society all by changing—or in an effort to change—its taste. This process moved the catfish from the ranks of a muddy tasting wild fish mainly associated with the poor, to a tasteless, cheap food consumed by all classes and ethnicities. Former cotton planters dug ponds and raised the fish, as researchers at land-grant universities gave the fish a taste and image makeover. Developing a bland meat and an efficient way to grow it presented only half the problem. Workers, predominately black, poor, and female, slaved away in dank, dangerous processing plants. Some struck, despite labor power’s impotence in a globalizing economy. Amid these labor disputes, competition from Vietnamese catfish imports began to trickle in onto the American seafood market. By the 2000s, the “Catfish Wars” had broken out between Asian importers and American farmers. Processors devised quality control measures that washed away the catfish’s distinctive qualities. They had done their work so well, that consumers could tell no difference between fish from around the globe. The farm-raised catfish embodied a culinary, cultural, and technological transformation. My work shows the importance of sensory experiences to southern culture, foodways, African American history, environmental history, and agricultural history.

This thesis was begun as just a history of the labor movement in Utah County, but as the research for data proceeded it became more evident that the factors influencing the retardation and development of the movement were the important things to consider. As a consequence, the greater portion of this work is so devoted.

By focusing on women workers at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, this study seeks to understand why women were initially congregated in certain occupations such as clerical work and later moved into non-traditional jobs such as engineering and the sciences. Such an investigation requires careful examination of the changing attitudes towards female workers in technical or non-traditional fields and why and how those attitudes changed over time and the extent to which this occurred. It also attempts to identify areas of continuing concern. The study reveals that several factors contributed to the women's progress in the workplace. These included the rise of the second wave of feminism, the federal government's support for the new feminism, favorable U.S. Supreme Court decisions and the willingness of officials at NASA's Kennedy Space Center to implement federal decrees. In addition, the women's movement expanded its efforts to encourage women to gain the skills and education that were necessary to move women into scientific and technical fields, although recently that effort has reached a plateau. The research for this study includes employee data from NASA and KSC, oral histories with female KSC workers, articles from KSC's official employee newsletter, Spaceport News, websites, and other secondary sources about women in technical fields, women in the workplace, and the recruitment of women into the labor force. Data from NASA and Spaceport News articles was also compared with information obtained through oral histories, to determine if the official policies of KSC influenced the behavior of its employees. Attention is also given to the legislation and court cases that opened doors for women seeking new avenues of advancement and the extent to which these outside factors influenced changes in women's employment and opportunities at KSC. This study shows that the status of women at KSC changed along with the larger women's movement in America. Supreme Court cases and Equal Employment Opportunity laws helped women gain headway in fields traditionally occupied by men. Women received token representation at first, but later moved up in their fields and even became senior managers. This change took place over a long period of time and is still ongoing. At the same time, there is still strong evidence of backlash and some weakening on the part of federal government in terms of its willingness to support women's drive for equality.

In the fall of 1921 oil workers of the San Joaquin Valley faced a post-war economic slump, wage cuts across the board and an increasingly hostile attitude of oil operators towards consultation with the federal government on labor relations. They voted to strike, and the next day eight thousand workers walked off the fields. Strikers crafted an image of “patriotic unionism,” underpinned by a faith in the federal government and the ideology of the American Legion. The strike did not end in gruesome class warfare like had been seen months earlier in the coal mines of West Virginia, but rather in ideological confusion and despair. The oil workers movement never fully embraced a class identity; instead it embraced the burgeoning conservative identity of Americanism. This effectively hobbled the growth of the movement. Upon the strike’s conclusion there was no mass pull to the left on the part of oil workers in the San Joaquin Valley, despite the fact that their movement’s design and identity had gotten them nowhere. On the contrary a portion of workers and supporters of the strike turned to the nativism of the Klan. Overall this project looks to complicate the narrative of “us vs. them” in labor history by analyzing workers’ identities, and also looks to contribute to the ever-evolving discourse on how historians should track American conservatism as a social force.

In 1990, over 3,000 of 4,500 New Orleans public school teachers refused to enter their classrooms over a contract dispute with their employer, the Orleans Parish School Board. For three weeks, teachers picketed while the negotiating team for their union, The United Teachers of New Orleans, worked to reach a contract agreement. Using interviews with striking teachers and union leaders, this paper aims to tell this story from their perspective. The interviews shed light on the ways that minorities and women used UTNO, with the incorporated ideologies and strategies of civil rights and feminism, as a platform to combat economic, political, and social inequalities in New Orleans at the end of the 20th century. An analysis of this strike also aims to complicate the current historiography of the union—filling the gap between its activism in the 1970s to its near dismantling after Hurricane Katrina.

This thesis is an inquiry into the problem of labor mobility in Utah County, Utah. Utah County has been designated as an area of substantial unemployment by the federal government. This thesis suggests one means to lessen this unemployment is through better mobility of the work force in Utah County.

As the Great Depression ravaged the United States, economic turmoil at home and geopolitical conflict abroad left Americans especially open to the Soviet Union’s expressed ideals of equality and internationalism. By extension, their domestic representative, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), achieved an unprecedented degree of cultural prominence – if not political success. For many American Bolsheviks, it would be that party’s official newspaper, the Daily Worker, to which they would turn for their morning news. At one time, the periodical could be found on newsstands throughout the country, and the party itself regarded the paper as the “central organ” of the movement. Throughout my writing I argue that press-oriented agitation and propaganda efforts played a key role in the political strategy of the CPUSA. Furthermore, I demonstrate that this strategy closely aligned with the desires of the party’s superiors in the Anglo-American wing of the Communist International (Comintern). These desires were reflected in the Daily Worker’s coverage, which maintained a stringently pro-Soviet line. As the outlet’s former chief editor Louis Budenz frankly observed before the US Congress in 1946, his paper and party “has never disagreed with the Stalinite line at any time.” By virtue of this long-standing, cooperative relationship I conclude that the Daily Worker’s editors can best be described not as dupes or drudges but as willing Stalinist collaborators.

My research aims to highlight the way in which Black political mobilization in the Southeastern United States specifically is linked to the movement for decolonization throughout Africa and the Caribbean in this time period. This project will include an examination of the thoughts and writings of many of the aforementioned key figures of the Pan African movement on the question of race and coloniality of Black people in the United States. I will organize this examination around the question of Black labor at this time period and the way in which it was (re) organized leading up to the Second World War leading to the “success” of development projects throughout the rural Southeast, mainly the Tennessee Valley Authority. This will lead to an analysis of the way in which Black southern communities specifically understood their positionality in connection to that of colonized subjects throughout the Black Atlantic.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Sue Zschoche / In the last two decades, the study of postwar American cities has gone through a significant revisionist reinterpretation that overturned an older story of urban decay and decline beginning with the tumultuous 1960s and the notion that a conservative white suburban backlash politics against civil rights and liberalism appeared only after 1966. These new studies have shown that, in fact, American cities had been in jeopardy as far back as the 1940s and that white right-wing backlash against civil rights was also much older than previously thought. This “urban crisis” scholarship also directly rebutted neoconservative and New Right arguments that Great Society liberal programs were at fault for the decline of inner-city African American neighborhoods in the past few decades by showing that the private sector real estate industry and 1930s New Deal housing programs, influenced by biased industry guidelines, caused those conditions through redlining. My case study similarly recasts the history of American inner cities in the last half of the twentieth century. It uses the Greater Kansas City metropolitan area, especially Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas, as a case study. I deliberately chose Kansas City because traditional urban histories and labor histories have tended to ignore it in favor of cities further east or on the west coast. Furthermore, I concur with recent trends in the historical scholarship of the Civil Rights Movement towards more of a focus on northern racism and loczating the beginning of the movement in the early twentieth century. In this study, I found evidence of civil rights activism in Kansas City, Missouri as far back as the late 1860s and 1870s. I trace the metropolitan area’s history all the way back to its antebellum beginnings, when slavery still divided the nation and a national railroad system was being built. I weave both labor and changes in transportation over time into the story of the city and its African-American population over time.