On 17–18 April 2004, the Midwest Labor and Working-Class History Colloquium (MLWCH) met at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Formed in 1994, MLWCH is a consortium of graduate students and faculty connected to the Midwest either through research interest or institutional affiliation. MLWCH exists to foster scholarly exchange amongst the field's future and current practitioners, provide an informal setting for students to present and receive feedback on their research, and nurture the collegial relationships that are essential to the study of history. This year's colloquium brought together eighteen graduate students and featured three events: an open forum on the question “Is it Labor or Working-Class History?” two roundtable discussions on participants' research, and a faculty-led roundtable on professional development.

Saturday's forum sparked a passionate discussion on the relative strengths of labor and working-class historians' descriptions of work and class. One participant bemoaned the cultural turn in labor history, arguing for a return to structural studies of opposition to capitalism at the point of production. Similarly, others suggested that labor historians are well positioned to compare the varieties of resistance located in the media, party politics, and expressive culture, as well as at work. Participants generally agreed, however, that labor and working-class history is primarily about power relationships.

One student reminded the group that class is but one of many interdependent markers of social difference that often take shape and are reinforced outside the workplace concluding, “Culture is the tie that binds.” Many agreed that historians who place the working class in the context of their communities best describe the relationships between identifiers such as class, race, and gender. In this sense it was argued that we must investigate the ways in which multiple identities and social practices learned in the in the community can reinforce, alter, or reject identities formed in the workplace. Historians of working people, it was agreed, can most readily get at these solidarities and divisions that are the substance of social power. To do this, two participants argued that labor and working-class historians must question their definitions of work in order to connect work for remuneration, unpaid work, and the quotidian efforts needed to make life possible so that the object of study becomes the work of living itself. In short, it is essential to investigate how labor, both traditionally defined and in unconventional workplaces, shaped community life, and how the community in turn defined the value of work and who is a laborer.

The group concluded on the point that labor historians' decision to study class in both material and ideological terms has led to a far reaching interdisciplinary conversation that by and large should be celebrated. Older generations of historians, we hope, can find inspiration in a group of young scholars committed to the study of working people's lives as well as the political implications of their chosen subject.

The rest of the afternoon was devoted to roundtables on participants' research projects. In the first roundtable Christopher D. Cantwell (Cornell University) reiterated the importance of breaking the boundaries between work and community by focusing on the religious practices of working people in late nineteenth-century America. Cantwell's emphasis was on the understudied local congregation. These individual congregations were not only the locus of religious experience for working people, but were also essential centers of discourse over issues of gender, ethnicity, and race.

Sarah Rose (University of Illinois, Chicago) next presented her fascinating project on how working-class disabled people became thought of as unproductive citizens in America. Rose suggested that it was not until the First World War that the definition of a normal life included having the ability to do productive work. Veterans returning home demanded to be rehabilitated in order to lead this normal life, eventually solidifying in American social policy worth and productivity.

Finally, Thilo Schimmel (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) made an impassioned case to take seriously the role of class in the German Democratic Republic. Schimmel drew intriguing conclusions from workers' shop-floor efforts to correct the inefficiencies of the socialist government, banding together to demand job reclassifications and the reorganization of production. While the state could proclaim the obliteration of class, Schimmel sees in these oppositional workplace combinations the reconstruction of class identities.

The second roundtable focused on four projects seeking to recover lost histories or revise historical memory by paying attention to working-class subjects and class relations. Lauren Braun (University of Illinois, Chicago) reported on a “path not taken” in the New South, an attempt to attract Italian immigrant farmers to revitalize Southern agriculture. Braun suggests that Southern boosters' alternative, nonindustrial vision for the region, and the Italian immigrants who attempted to take advantage of agricultural opportunities, reveal ambiguities of social and economic power in the New South.

Erik Gellman (Northwestern University) highlighted the national network of grassroots labor and civil rights activists that the National Negro Congress (NNC) created between 1936 and 1947. Gellman recovers the previously unacknowledged history of the NNC's post-1940 achievements, which he argues disappeared from the record in the postwar reactionary environment. Gellman seeks to focus on working-class intellectuals and reorient the history of 1940s civil rights from the politics of respectability to militant activism on the street.

Jeffrey Helgeson (University of Illinois, Chicago) followed up on Gellman's study of black working-class activism to discuss the politics of Second World War African-American migration. Helgeson contends that, despite numerous insightful histories of black migration, we still do not have a study that clearly describes the relationships between migrants' own experience and a broader sociopolitical discourse. According to Helgeson, migrants' connections with sociologists, politicians, civic activists, and artists profoundly shaped postwar class, race, and gender relations nationally.

Braun, Gellman, and Helgeson all touched on the power of popular memory to skew our perceptions of history. This sub-theme on historical memory fit well with the final presentation from Lara Leigh Kelland (University of Illinois, Chicago), who offered her research on collective memory and the 1886 Haymarket Incident. Kelland argues that the shifting power of institutions with different class bases shaped the “packaging” of an event like Haymarket by its inheritors. Her history points to the relative power of groups as diverse as the Chicago Police, the Illinois Labor History Society, the Weathermen, and present-day anarchists.

The colloquium concluded on Sunday with a roundtable on professional development led by James Barrett (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Leon Fink (University of Illinois, Chicago), and Susan Levine (University of Illinois, Chicago). The building of curriculum vitae for jobs, teaching portfolios, and time management in research were discussed.

We parted ways Sunday afternoon in good spirits. For two days we discussed everything from religiosity to the economic and cultural consequences of disability, and as we did it became apparent what was so unique about labor history. No matter how varied our topics were, each of us shared a foundational conviction that what people did for a living had a profound impact on their lives and those they interacted with. This array of topics guided by a singular concern constituted the heart and soul of this gathering; and potentially the future of the field.

As the 2004 meeting left many themes open for discussion, MLWCH is currently looking for a venue for its next meeting in Spring 2005. Anyone interested in hosting a group of energetic graduate students, please contact this year's organizer, Emily LaBarbera-Twarog, at the University of Illinois, Chicago (ph.: 312-413-9358, e-mail: elabar1@uic.edu). Emily did an outstanding job organizing this year's meeting, and she is willing to give advice to the next hearty soul wanting to build on MLWCH's momentum.