Rosemary Feurer

Current Research

I am a labor historian who focuses on the political economy of social conflict from the nineteenth century to the present. As an interdisciplinary public historian, I have produced dozens of exhibits, documentaries, walking and driving tours, markers, mapping and other digital history projects, art, theater, and place-based projects. All of these projects developed through engagement with communities. The Mother Jones Heritage Project includes placing a sculpture of Mother Jones at Chicago's Historic Water Tower, as part of an effort to re-envision historical monuments and narratives. I have been a featured historian in dozens of documentaries and podcasts, including PBS American Experience's The Mine Wars. I am currently working on several projects and books, including The Illinois Mine Wars, 1860-1940, which reinterprets the epic conflicts in mining communities, a new biography of Mother Jones, and a place-based exploration titled The Mother Jones Road Tour of Illinois Labor History.

Major Publications

Books

• Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. With Chad Pearson. Working Class in American History Series
• Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950. Working Class in American History Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2006.
  • Winner of the 2007 Wentworth Prize in U.S. History

Articles/Book Chapters

• "Labor's First Green New Deal," in America's Longest River: A Cultural and Environmental History of the Missouri River, Jon K. Lauck, ed. (Center for Western Studies Press, forthcoming: 2025).
• "Contesting ‘the Insatiable Maw of Capital': Mine Worker Struggles in the Civil War," Civil War History (Special issue on Labor and the Civil War), September 2024, 17-42.
• "The Struggle to Save Progressive Unions: Carl Marzani and Union Films." with Charles Musser, in Rethinking the Cinematic Cold War: The Struggle for Hearts and Minds Goes Global, edited by Stefano Pisu, Francesco Pitassio, Maurizio Zinni (Oxford & N.Y.: Berghann Publishers, 2024).
• The Famine Diaspora and Irish American Women's Writing, ed. Peter O'Neill, Marguérite Corporaal and Jason King (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2023).
• "Mother Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: Radical Women of the Irish Diaspora" in The Famine Diaspora and Irish American Women's Writing, Peter O'Neill, Marguérite Corporaal and Jason King (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2023).
• "Mother Jones and the Blair Mountain Telegram," Goldenseal: Magazine of West Virginia, June 2022.
• "Revisiting Mother Jones' Telegram incident, and the Blair Mountain Uprising," Goldenseal: Magazine of West Virginia, June 2022.
• "Cold War in the American Working Class." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Ed. Jon Butler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.
• Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. (With Chad Pearson. Working Class in American History Series).
• "The Strange Career of A.A. Ahner: Reconsidering Blackjacks and Briefcases," in Organizing Against Labor: Controversies in the History of Organized Employer Rosemary Feurer and Chad Pearson, eds. (University of Illinois Press, 2017) pp. 158-183
• "Labor Unions and Democracy" in Labor Studies Journal , Volume 47 Issues, June 2022
• "Mother Jones: A Global History of Struggle and Remembrance: From Cork, Ireland to Illinois." Illinois Heritage May 2013.
• "Learning From and Rethinking the Staley Struggle of the 1990s" WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society 13 (1) March 2010, 153-168.
• "Labor's Community-Based Economic and Environmental Planning, and Cold War Politics: The UE's St. Louis District, 1941-1946." In Shelton Stromquist, ed. Labor's Cold War: Local Politics in a Global Context. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
• Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950. Working Class in American History Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2006.
• "Crossing the Boundaries Between Community and Union: The Nutpickers Union in St. Louis, 1933-1934", in Staughton Lynd, ed., "We Are All Leaders": the Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996) [The Working Class in American History series] 27-50.

Public History Projects

• Mother Jones: America's Most Dangerous Woman (2007).
• Mother Jones Heritage Project (including walking, hiking and biking tours, multiple museum exhibits and markers, and stories at Mother Jones Museum
• Fannie Sellins Exhibit at St. Louis Library
• St. Louis Labor History Tour
• Website manager: Labor history in the U.S
• Editor, LaborOnline, the blog for the journal Labor: Studies in Working Class History and the Labor and Working Class History Association

Teaching Interests

I have taught a variety of courses in U.S. history, including labor history, U.S. capitalism and its critics, social protest movements, radicalism, political repression, Illinois history, and the U.S. survey. My graduate seminars explore labor, capitalism, race, and labor groups.