Hexbears. I need your help. I have a term paper that I need a topic for. Here’s the rub: It’s for US history, and the topic has to be US history before 1893. I wanted to write about labor unions, which took off in the US around the 1870s, but the real “history” of organized labor in the US takes place well past 1893. So the professor will very likely reject that.

I’m not a history person. I know, I know “those who don’t learn from the past…” I don’t want to write about the American civil war and all that shit though. It’s been done to death. Any ideas on a topic I could pick that would be more interesting and more left-leaning?

Not asking for any help writing it. I just need some help picking a topic that would be interesting to research.

  • Wertheimer [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    11 days ago

    1893 rang a bell for me because that was the year the Western Federation of Miners was established. There’s a lot of interesting research to be done on the early attempts to organize in western mining towns, and the Couer d’Alene strike of 1892 and the subsequent founding of the WFM (which later helped found the IWW) would make for a perfect stopping point for your narrative.

    The first volume of Philip Foner’s history of American labor takes place entirely within your time period (it ends with the founding of the AFL), so you can mine that for other ideas that could be worthy of a paper.

    …

    A great book that just came out last year, Dylan Penningroth’s Before the Movement, uses local archives (in Virginia and Mississippi mainly) to investigate how Black Americans made use of the legal system before the Civil Rights Era. The first few chapters may give you ideas of something to investigate in your own state’s archives - how people even without formal rights went about getting married and divorced, slaves who owned property, lawyers who catered to Black clients, etc.