Faculty Detail

Randi Storch

I am currently researching the life of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise in order to write a social biography of his activities related to labor conflict, race relations, immigration, and US foreign policy.

Education

B.A., University of Florida, 1991, with Honors in History, Phi Beta Kappa
M.A., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1992, Department of History
Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1998, Department of History

Teaching

US History, 1877 to the Present

US History, 1877 to 1920

US History, 1920 to the Present

US Labor and Working Class History

US Women’s History

Sophomore Methods

Senior Seminar

Graduate Seminar

Graduate Readings in US labor and Working Class History

Graduate Readings in Labor Radicalism

Graduate Readings in US Women’s History

Publications

Books

Working Hard for the American Dream: Workers and their Unions from WWI to the Present (London: Wiley, 2013).

Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928-1935 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007)

Articles

“American Communism and Soviet Russia: A View from Chicago’s Streets,” American Communist History 8.1 (June 2009), 25-28.

“’The Realities of the Situation’: Revolutionary Discipline and Everyday Political Life in Chicago’s Communist Party, 1928-1935,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 1:3 (2004), 19-44.

“Teaching Class: Labor and Working Class History in the US Survey,” Teaching History: A Journal of Methods 5 (2004), 14-23.

“Moscow’s Archives and the New History of the Communist Party of the United States,” Perspectives 38 (2000), 44-50.

Book Chapters

“’Their UnCommunist Stand’: Chicago’s Foreign Language Speaking Communists and the Question of Stalinization,” in Norman Laporte, Kevin Morgan, and Matthew Worley eds., Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern: Perspectives on Stalinization, 1917-53 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 263-282.

“The United Packinghouse Workers of America: Civil Rights and the Communist Party in Chicago,” in Kerry Taylor, Bill Issel, and Robert Cherny eds., American Labor and the Cold War (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 72-84.

Selected Book Reviews

World Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012) in American Historical Review (April 2013).

Aaron Purcell, White Collar Radicals: TVA’s Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal and the McCarthy Era (Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 2009) in American Historical Review 116, 5 (December 2011), 1523-1524.

Thomas Sakmyster, Red Conspirator: J. Peters and The American Communist Underground (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011) in The Journal of American History 98 (2011), 871-872.

Tony Michels, A Fire in their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005) in American Communist History 9 (2010), 318-320.

Gregory Taylor, The History of the Communist Party in North Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009) in Journal of Southern History 77 (2010), 207-208.

Rosemary Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006) in American Communist History 8 (2009): 105-108.

Bryan Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007) in Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 5 (2008), 108-110.

Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) in American Communist History 7 (2008), 88-90.

Prometheus Research Library, Dog Days: James P. Cannon vs. Max Shactman in the League of America, 1931-1933 (New York: Spartacist Publishing Company, 2002) in American Communist History 2 (2003), 117-119.

Joel Rast, Remaking Chicago: The Political Origins of Urban Industrial Change (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999) in Michigan Historical Review (Spring 2002), 145-147.

Youngsoo Bae, Labor in Retreat: Class and Community Among Men’s Clothing Workers of Chicago, 1871-1929 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001) in Industrial and Labor Relations Review (July 2002), 752-753.

Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 1998) in Left History 6 (2000), 168-173.

Harvy Klehr, John Haynes, and Kirill Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) in Labour/Le Travail (Fall 1999) 272-274.

Selected Encyclopedia Entries

“Communist Party and Labor,” A. Cayton, J.R. Sisson, and C. Zacher eds., The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 1284-1285.

“Communist Party” and “Red Squad,” James R. Grossman, Janet Reiff, and Ann Durkin Keating eds., The Encyclopedia of Chicago History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 189-190 and 683.

Labor On-Line Blog entries:

“Teaching about Collective Bargaining- The Case of Flint, Michigan” 2013

http://lawcha.org/wordpress/2013/08/24/teaching-about-collective-bargaining-the-case-of-flint-michigan/

“Sharpen your Pencils and Your Pitchforks” 2013

http://lawcha.org/wordpress/2013/05/01/sharpen-your-pencils-and-your-pitchforks/

President Obama’s Budget Proposal Addresses Wealth Inequality in America: Just Kidding” 2013

http://lawcha.org/wordpress/2013/04/11/president-obamas-budget-proposal-addresses-wealth-inequality-in-america-just-kidding/

“Drones for Democracy?” 2013

http://www.lawcha.org/wordpress/2013/02/09/drones-for-democracy/

“Gompers Redux? Or, Does Labor Need the State to Meddle?” 2012

http://www.lawcha.org/wordpress/2012/12/14/gompers-redux-or-what-use-is-a-state-anyway/

“We are the World,” 2012