On the eve of his execution in 1915, Joe Hill — radical songwriter, union organiser and member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) — penned one final telegram from his Utah prison cell: “Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don’t want to be found dead in Utah.” Hill’s body was then cremated, his ashes placed into tiny packets and sent to IWW Locals, sympathetic organizations and individuals around the world. Among the nations said to receive Hill’s ashes, New Zealand is listed. Remains to be Seen traces the ashes of Joe Hill from their distribution in Chicago to wartime New Zealand. Drawing on previously unseen archival material, it examines the persecution of anarchists, socialists and Wobblies in New Zealand during the First World War. It also explores how intense censorship measures — put in place by the National Coalition Government of William Massey and zealously enforced by New Zealand’s Solicitor-General, Sir John Salmond — effectively silenced and suppressed the IWW in New Zealand.

This study is a comprehensive literature review examining labor songs within trade unions, the labor movement, and in strike contexts. This research answers the following questions: whether the performance and composing of labor songs is dead within the twenty-first century and whether labor songs are a topic worthy of study in academia. The study also contemplates how to permanently reinvigorate academic interest in this topic. This review reveals that there is an impoverished amount of published literature about labor songs and a need for more documentation that is active, preservation, and research. Most published literature covers a period spanning the 1900s to the 1950s and is primarily American and British centric. The overarching goal of this research is to advocate the importance of labor song documentation and preservation for future research purposes and for preserving working class culture, history, and identity as they provide an alternative historical viewpoint and other invaluable information.

This article focuses on the tens of thousands of itinerant workers, also known as tramps or hoboes, who provided the primary labor force for the natural resource extraction industries of the American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Itinerant workers' visceral encounters with nature differed from the experiences of most urban residents in this era of city growth and related anxiety about Americans' loss of contact with the natural world. This article argues that some hoboes embraced time spent in " wild " nature as an escape from work, and they consciously asserted their ability to appreciate nature in the face of claims that such appreciation was class-specific. As workers and as travelers, itinerant laborers experienced and knew nature in ways that reflected both their distinct circumstances as mobile industrial wage workers and the cultural context of a national obsession with nonhuman nature.

Updated research of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) members and innocent bystanders that were that were killed while organizing, striking, taking direct action, or for carrying a Red Card. This update includes Notes and a link to a GoogleDrive folder that holds individual files of those killed, Bibliography, Support Documents and Burial Sites.

A brief look at the contributions of labor historians to an understanding of the American working class and their unions.

This article is an analysis of minority political invention in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Against the tendency in recent social and cultural theory to dichotomize class and difference, it argues that it was in and throughthe IWW’s formulation of class that minority political and cultural inventionoccurred. Using the framework of Deleuze and Guattari’s minor politics, thearticle shows how the IWW’s composition in the simultaneously diffuse and cramped plane of work operated against the major political identities and subjects of worker, immigrant, American, citizen and ‘people’, and towards thecreation of minority political knowledges, tactics and cultural styles premised on the condition that ‘the people are missing’. Seeking to understand the IWW’smodes and techniques of invention, the article explores the general plane of IWW composition, its particular political and cultural expressions (in songs,manifestos, cartoons and tactics), and its minor mode of authorship. The articlefocuses in particular on two aspects of IWW minority composition, the itinerant worker, or hobo, and the politics of sabotage.