LAWCHA Pandemic Book Talks Gear Up for Post-pandemic Future

Abstract

The pandemic forced us all to make many rapid changes, personally and professionally. With the canceling of events and the transition of others online, many of us were struggling to adapt. It became clear that we were going to need to create new ways to share our work as well as to keep abreast of new scholarship. With this in mind, Cindy Hahamovitch launched the LAWCHA Pandemic Book Talks to help support authors and to promote their newly published labor history books. These talks are free and open to the public. I was brought on board to help promote and host the monthly events.The series got off to a great start in May by hosting Jaquelyn Dowd Hall to discuss the award-winning Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America. Well over one hundred people registered, and approximately seventy people attended. We were invigorated that there were attendees from across the country. Frank Stricker, discussing American Unemployment: Past, Present, and Future, followed in June. Verónica Martínez-Matsuda presented Migrant Citizenship: Race, Rights, and Reform in the Farm Labor Camp Program in July, followed by Michael Goldfield on his The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s in August. In the early fall Hahamovitch turned over the booking and hosting of talks to me.By September many of us were back on campus, virtually or otherwise. That month we hosted Marjoleine Kars, who presented Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast. Attendance was great, and we look forward to more discussions of Latin American labor history in the future. Touré F. Reed (Toward Freedom: The Case against Race Reductionism) and Robert Chase (We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America) discussed their timely books in October and November, respectively. Jarod Roll's Poor Man's Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850–1950 and Alexandra Finley's An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America's Domestic Slave Trade got the winter off and running with their engaging discussions. The Q&A for Roll's talk was so packed with questions that in the interest of time I was required to shift away from the normal format of unmuting attendees to let them ask their questions directly; instead I read their questions for them. Finley's talk went so well that a sizable contingent of attendees remained on after the official Q&A ended, so it morphed to an informal social event. This is exactly the type of community engagement we hoped to foster. Toni Gilpin, Deborah Willis, Cristina Viviana Groeger, Walter Johnson, Ron Schatz, and Alice L. Baumgartner are all slated to carry us through the summer of 2021. Since not everyone can attend the events, the talks have been recorded and will be free to view on LAWCHA's soon-to-be-launched YouTube channel.The book talks have been such a success that we have decided to keep them going for the foreseeable future, though we do look forward to dropping Pandemic from the title. Although Covid has forced to us to make changes, there can be no returning to a normal of social inequality and environmental degradation. The online format of the book talks will allow us to reduce our carbon footprint while continuing to stay engaged with one another and discuss current scholarship. As with most things that are created on an emergency basis and then transition into permanency, we are restructuring how the talks are organized and run. A committee (Bryant Barnes, Eileen Boris, Alexandra Finley, Verónica Martinez-Matsuda, Adrienne Petty, and I) will choose the authors collectively and share the other responsibilities.