Working History

Journalist Victoria Bouloubasis discusses her career reporting on agricultural and food labor in North Carolina, her approach to labor journalism, and how she uses histories in her work. Show Notes: "A North Carolina Farmworker Was Accused of Abusing His Workers. Then Big Tobacco Backed His Election," by Ben Stockton and Victoria Bouloubasis, Mother Jones, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and Enlace Latino NC: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/tobacco-reynolds-north-carolina-brent-jackson-tbij/ "How a Tobacco Company Funds a Mega-Farmer’s Political Ambitions That Hurt Workers" podcast in English: https://soundcloud.com/enlacelatinoncpodcast/how-a-tobacco-company-funds-a-mega-farmers-political-ambitions-that-hurt-workers "Cómo una tabacalera financia las ambiciones políticas de granjero que perjudica a los trabajadores" podcast en español: https://soundcloud.com/enlacelatinoncpodcast/como-una-tabacalera-financia-las-ambiciones-politicas-de-un-granjero-que-perjudica-a-los-trabajadores Victoria's reporting for Enlace Latino NC: https://enlacelatinonc.org/author/victoria-bouloubasis/ Victoria's reporting for Southerly: https://southerlymag.org/author/victoria-bouloubasis/

Dr. Wendy Gonaver discusses her book, "The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880," the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Virginia, and the roles that race, the institution of slavery, and slave labor played in the development of psychiatric diagnosis and care through the nineteenth century and beyond.

Professor Blain Roberts of California State University, Fresno, talks about intersections of race, identity, and memory in the South in a wide-ranging discussion that starts in the segregated beauty parlors of the Jim Crow era and ends with remembrances of slavery in modern-day Charleston, South Carolina.

Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt discuss their new edited volume, Reconsidering Southern Labor History, the nexus of race, class and power in the history of labor in the South, and how a new generation of southern labor scholars are changing our understanding of labor's past, present and future in the region.

Lane Windham, Associate Director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, discusses her book, Knocking on Labor’s Door, and why the 1970s should be seen as more than a moment of decline for the U.S. labor movement.