Kudos

NIU History Professor Rosemary Feurer found herself hard at work over the Labor Day holiday. She spent the weekend in Evansville, Ind., where she was a guest speaker for the annual Labor Day Association celebration.

The association’s choice of speakers couldn’t have been more appropriate. Feurer, who also was featured in three articles in the Evansville Courier & Press, has a new book out this fall titled “Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950” (University of Illinois Press, 2006).

The book illuminates the important but often forgotten history that pitted Midwestern electrical and machine workers against the bitterly anti-union electrical industry “independents.” District Eight of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE) was led by the openly communist William Sentner.

The book demonstrates how community-based organizing and radical ideals mattered in the workers movement of the 1930s and 1940s. It also shows how Midwest worker-protest traditions and strategies were damaged by the Cold War purge of radicals from the labor movement.

Says Peter Rachleff, professor of history at Macalester College: “Feurer’s careful analysis, well aware of the contemporary crisis of organized labor, will quickly become the first book examined by labor scholars and activists who seek to find maps to a better future in the experiences of the past.”

More on Feurer’s book can be found online at www.radicalunionism.niu.edu.

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Milivoje Kostic, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the College of Engineering and Engineering Technology, has been appointed to the International Scientific Advisory Board for the UNESCO sponsored 4th Dubrovnik Conference on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems.

The aim of this conference is to create new strategies for the development of improved transportation systems. Topics will include hybrid vehicles, bio-fuels and hydrogen for use in vehicles and development of pollution control systems.

Kostic is one of only nine U.S. scientists asked to serve on the advisory board.

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Following the military coup in Thailand two weeks ago, the media called upon the expertise of NIU political scientist Daniel Unger, a faculty associate of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and an expert on Thai politics.

Unger was interviewed by Voice of America, a Los Angeles radio station, National Public Radio and other media outlets. The four-minute NPR interview can be accessed online at www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6105358.

Unger returned to NIU a month ago after spending a year in Bangkok while on sabbatical.

10-2-06