Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Biographic Data
| ID | 1240418 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elizabeth Tandy Shermer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elizabeth Tandy |
| FAMILY NAME | Shermer |
| SIGNATURE | SHERMER E T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Loyola University Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9579-5453 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 37 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 26 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd. Resistance from the Right
Illusions of Progress
A “Multiracial Injustice”
Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley was one of many progressive Democrats denouncing student debt as a “multigenerational, multiracial injustice” in the new millennium. She joined researchers, activists, and frustrated borrowers in pointing out that federal student loan programs disproportionately left people of color, especially women, drowning in college debt
On Account of Sex
Most Americans know Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a feminist icon whose likeness can still be found (more than two years after her passing) on T-shirts, mugs, and stickers. Images of the “Notorious RBG” usually show her in Supreme Court robes with the kind of stylish white collar the justice favored, and fans can now buy or get knitting patterns for the collar online. This cult following really grew in the new millennium, when Ginsburg developed a reput…
What It Took to Win
What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party is timely and ambitious. Many observers have expressed real doubts about the ability of the Democratic Party to win elections because of (but certainly not limited to) the poorly handled 2020 census, state voter-suppression laws, Supreme Court decisions upholding those laws, and partisan gerrymandering. But Michael Kazin takes a refreshingly different approach. What It Took to Win offers a sw…
The Industrialists
Journal Article The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism Get access The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism. By Jennifer A Delton. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. xiv, 342 pp. Cloth, $45.00. Paper, $32.00.) Elizabeth Shermer Elizabeth Shermer Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Search for other works by this author on: O…
Coerced
Sociologist Erin Hatton's Coerced: Work under Threat of Punishment (2020) is a must-read for US labor historians interested in the carceral state, American higher education's employment policies, unfree labor practices, and legal definitions of an employee with basic workplace rights. This book connects all of these vital topics in a study of the importance of coercion in the contemporary American labor market by focusing on the legal, legitimate…
Jarod Roll. Poor Man’s Fortune
“[L]usty, exciting, fearful, prodigious, and cruelly strong” (258) was how a local historian described Tri-State mining in 1983, when the Environmental Protection Agency labeled her town one of the worst Superfund sites. Jarod Roll’s exhaustively researched Poor Man’s Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850–1950 helps explain why she and her neighbors recoiled at pity then. “It was not failure, not exploitation, n…
Transaction Man
“This book,” Nicholas Lemann concludes, “has examined a succession of grand conceptions of how to organize the economy to produce a good society” (252). That simple sentence best summarizes Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream. The New Yorker staff writer and Columbia University journalism professor promised to take readers from the White House's inner chambers to struggling neighborhoods. Instead, he focuse…
Author's Response
I am both grateful and humbled by the time that Trevor Griffey, Edward Balleisen, Claire Potter, and Christopher Newfield took to craft their incisive critiques, generous comments, and concerns about American higher education's past, present, and future. I also need to thank Eric Arnesen for asking me to write something provocative about the idea of the neoliberal university in the pandemic's early weeks. He asked for something beyond the more fa…
What's Really New about the Neoliberal University? The Business of American Education Has Always Been Business
Journalists, academics, and ordinary Americans wrongly bemoan the student debt and college financing crises as two separate unhappy endings to a mythical story of unprecedented postwar federal and state support for higher education. Rarely have they considered that either catastrophe has anything to do with the labor question. Yet the thousands of Americans in debt and the many colleges facing bankruptcy (even before the pandemic) are intertwined…
Why Massive Forgiveness Won’t Solve the Student-Debt Crisis
Keywords capitalism, debt, education, finance, gender discrimination, politics, working class, racism
Hope and Scorn
Do public intellectuals flourish when civil society is suppressed?” (p. 252). That question ends Michael J. Brown's Hope and Scorn, which explores the role of and response to post–World War II intellectuals. He emphasizes that debates about the place of public thinkers have been a continuous feature of U.S. political culture. His book focuses on how postwar attacks on eggheads, such as 1950s Democratic presidential hopeful Adlai Stevenson, evolve…
We Are the Union
“In order to change,” retired machinist Keith Thomas warned communications professor Dana L. Cloud, “union bosses would have to give up power. This isn’t going to happen. They run unions like they belonged to them, and they should have been running unions like they belonged to the rank and file” (169). Thomas’s frustrations should hardly raise the eyebrows of labor scholars, politicians, or voters, who are well aware that workers have sometimes f…
Forging Rivals
“Labor rights are civil rights” has often been a rallying cry for both activists and scholars. Yet the very need to make such a declaration speaks to the fact that most people in the United States think of the two multifaceted crusades as separate, if not actually at odds with one another. That divide seemed particularly clear in the 1980s and 1990s, especially within the academy. While New Left labor historians still lionized forgotten moments o…
Revisiting the Urban Steelbelt’s Liberalism
Standing on Common Ground
The best work in the new “history of capitalism” field borrows from the tool kits of social and cultural historians and rests on the assumption that states, societies, and markets cannot be treated separately from one another. That central observation feeds the contemporary impulse to reconnect subfields, such as business, labor, and politics, which had drifted apart since the 1970s. Already this methodology has returned scholarship on the ninete…
Greening the Red, White, and Blue
Indentured Studenthood
Kari Frederickson. Cold War Dixie
Journal Article Kari Frederickson. Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South. Get access Kari Frederickson. Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South. (Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South.) Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2013. Pp. xii, 226. Cloth $69.95, paper $24.95, e-book $24.95. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Loyola University Chicago eshermer@luc…
Who Is Wagging Whom? Power and the New History of American Populism
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Interchange
This "Interchange" discussion took place online in late September and early October 2013.As with past interchanges, we encouraged participants to engage in a free-flowing discussion focused on our moderator's questions, their own perspectives and conjectures, and each other's comments.What follows is an edited version of the very lively online conversation that resulted
The Right Side of the Sixties
Laura Jane Gifford and Daniel K. Williams promise that the twelve essays in their anthology The Right Side of the Sixties will advance scholarship on conservatism beyond headlining politicians and the movement's “reaction against liberalism” (p. 4). Conservatives, they maintain, triumphed because the grassroots “contested the future of their movement[,] ... discovered what they really believed,” and drove the movement's “shifts and transformation…
Stayin' Alive
Book Review| May 01 2012 Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working ClassCowie, Jefferson New York: New Press, 2010 488 pp., $27.95 (cloth) Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2012) 9 (2): 154–157. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-1540097 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Linke…
Counter-Organizing the Sunbelt
Right-to-work elections are one of the most understudied aspects in the formation of Sunbelt conservatism and the rise of the Right. After World War II, every Southwestern state put some kind of right-to-work referendum on the ballot. Support came from the most dynamic economic sectors whose anti-union activists stood in rebellion against the New Deal regulatory state. They promised prosperity based on laissez-faire growth to transform the region…
Interchange
This "Interchange" discussion took place online in late September and early October 2013.As with past interchanges, we encouraged participants to engage in a free-flowing discussion focused on our moderator's questions, their own perspectives and conjectures, and each other's comments.What follows is an edited version of the very lively online conversation that resulted
Counter-Organizing the Sunbelt
Right-to-work elections are one of the most understudied aspects in the formation of Sunbelt conservatism and the rise of the Right. After World War II, every Southwestern state put some kind of right-to-work referendum on the ballot. Support came from the most dynamic economic sectors whose anti-union activists stood in rebellion against the New Deal regulatory state. They promised prosperity based on laissez-faire growth to transform the region…
What's Really New about the Neoliberal University? The Business of American Education Has Always Been Business
Journalists, academics, and ordinary Americans wrongly bemoan the student debt and college financing crises as two separate unhappy endings to a mythical story of unprecedented postwar federal and state support for higher education. Rarely have they considered that either catastrophe has anything to do with the labor question. Yet the thousands of Americans in debt and the many colleges facing bankruptcy (even before the pandemic) are intertwined…
Indentured Studenthood
Stayin' Alive
Book Review| May 01 2012 Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working ClassCowie, Jefferson New York: New Press, 2010 488 pp., $27.95 (cloth) Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2012) 9 (2): 154–157. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-1540097 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Linke…
What It Took to Win
What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party is timely and ambitious. Many observers have expressed real doubts about the ability of the Democratic Party to win elections because of (but certainly not limited to) the poorly handled 2020 census, state voter-suppression laws, Supreme Court decisions upholding those laws, and partisan gerrymandering. But Michael Kazin takes a refreshingly different approach. What It Took to Win offers a sw…
The Right Side of the Sixties
Laura Jane Gifford and Daniel K. Williams promise that the twelve essays in their anthology The Right Side of the Sixties will advance scholarship on conservatism beyond headlining politicians and the movement's “reaction against liberalism” (p. 4). Conservatives, they maintain, triumphed because the grassroots “contested the future of their movement[,] ... discovered what they really believed,” and drove the movement's “shifts and transformation…
Visions of Belonging
Book Review| December 01 2006 Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940-1960 Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940-1960 Judith E. Smith New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 xvi + 444 pp., $41.50 (cloth) Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2006) 3 (4): 96–98. https://doi.org/10.121…
Counter-Organizing the Sunbelt
Right-to-work elections are one of the most understudied aspects in the formation of Sunbelt conservatism and the rise of the Right. After World War II, every Southwestern state put some kind of right-to-work referendum on the ballot. Support came from the most dynamic economic sectors whose anti-union activists stood in rebellion against the New Deal regulatory state. They promised prosperity based on laissez-faire growth to transform the region…
Stayin' Alive
Book Review| May 01 2012 Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working ClassCowie, Jefferson New York: New Press, 2010 488 pp., $27.95 (cloth) Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2012) 9 (2): 154–157. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-1540097 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Linke…
The Right Side of the Sixties
Laura Jane Gifford and Daniel K. Williams promise that the twelve essays in their anthology The Right Side of the Sixties will advance scholarship on conservatism beyond headlining politicians and the movement's “reaction against liberalism” (p. 4). Conservatives, they maintain, triumphed because the grassroots “contested the future of their movement[,] ... discovered what they really believed,” and drove the movement's “shifts and transformation…
Kari Frederickson. Cold War Dixie
Journal Article Kari Frederickson. Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South. Get access Kari Frederickson. Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South. (Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South.) Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2013. Pp. xii, 226. Cloth $69.95, paper $24.95, e-book $24.95. Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Elizabeth Tandy Shermer Loyola University Chicago eshermer@luc…
Who Is Wagging Whom? Power and the New History of American Populism
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Interchange
This "Interchange" discussion took place online in late September and early October 2013.As with past interchanges, we encouraged participants to engage in a free-flowing discussion focused on our moderator's questions, their own perspectives and conjectures, and each other's comments.What follows is an edited version of the very lively online conversation that resulted
Greening the Red, White, and Blue
Indentured Studenthood
Revisiting the Urban Steelbelt’s Liberalism
Standing on Common Ground
The best work in the new “history of capitalism” field borrows from the tool kits of social and cultural historians and rests on the assumption that states, societies, and markets cannot be treated separately from one another. That central observation feeds the contemporary impulse to reconnect subfields, such as business, labor, and politics, which had drifted apart since the 1970s. Already this methodology has returned scholarship on the ninete…
We Are the Union
“In order to change,” retired machinist Keith Thomas warned communications professor Dana L. Cloud, “union bosses would have to give up power. This isn’t going to happen. They run unions like they belonged to them, and they should have been running unions like they belonged to the rank and file” (169). Thomas’s frustrations should hardly raise the eyebrows of labor scholars, politicians, or voters, who are well aware that workers have sometimes f…
Forging Rivals
“Labor rights are civil rights” has often been a rallying cry for both activists and scholars. Yet the very need to make such a declaration speaks to the fact that most people in the United States think of the two multifaceted crusades as separate, if not actually at odds with one another. That divide seemed particularly clear in the 1980s and 1990s, especially within the academy. While New Left labor historians still lionized forgotten moments o…
Transaction Man
“This book,” Nicholas Lemann concludes, “has examined a succession of grand conceptions of how to organize the economy to produce a good society” (252). That simple sentence best summarizes Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream. The New Yorker staff writer and Columbia University journalism professor promised to take readers from the White House's inner chambers to struggling neighborhoods. Instead, he focuse…
Author's Response
I am both grateful and humbled by the time that Trevor Griffey, Edward Balleisen, Claire Potter, and Christopher Newfield took to craft their incisive critiques, generous comments, and concerns about American higher education's past, present, and future. I also need to thank Eric Arnesen for asking me to write something provocative about the idea of the neoliberal university in the pandemic's early weeks. He asked for something beyond the more fa…
What's Really New about the Neoliberal University? The Business of American Education Has Always Been Business
Journalists, academics, and ordinary Americans wrongly bemoan the student debt and college financing crises as two separate unhappy endings to a mythical story of unprecedented postwar federal and state support for higher education. Rarely have they considered that either catastrophe has anything to do with the labor question. Yet the thousands of Americans in debt and the many colleges facing bankruptcy (even before the pandemic) are intertwined…
Why Massive Forgiveness Won’t Solve the Student-Debt Crisis
Keywords capitalism, debt, education, finance, gender discrimination, politics, working class, racism
Hope and Scorn
Do public intellectuals flourish when civil society is suppressed?” (p. 252). That question ends Michael J. Brown's Hope and Scorn, which explores the role of and response to post–World War II intellectuals. He emphasizes that debates about the place of public thinkers have been a continuous feature of U.S. political culture. His book focuses on how postwar attacks on eggheads, such as 1950s Democratic presidential hopeful Adlai Stevenson, evolve…
Coerced
Sociologist Erin Hatton's Coerced: Work under Threat of Punishment (2020) is a must-read for US labor historians interested in the carceral state, American higher education's employment policies, unfree labor practices, and legal definitions of an employee with basic workplace rights. This book connects all of these vital topics in a study of the importance of coercion in the contemporary American labor market by focusing on the legal, legitimate…
Jarod Roll. Poor Man’s Fortune
“[L]usty, exciting, fearful, prodigious, and cruelly strong” (258) was how a local historian described Tri-State mining in 1983, when the Environmental Protection Agency labeled her town one of the worst Superfund sites. Jarod Roll’s exhaustively researched Poor Man’s Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850–1950 helps explain why she and her neighbors recoiled at pity then. “It was not failure, not exploitation, n…
A “Multiracial Injustice”
Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley was one of many progressive Democrats denouncing student debt as a “multigenerational, multiracial injustice” in the new millennium. She joined researchers, activists, and frustrated borrowers in pointing out that federal student loan programs disproportionately left people of color, especially women, drowning in college debt
On Account of Sex
Most Americans know Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a feminist icon whose likeness can still be found (more than two years after her passing) on T-shirts, mugs, and stickers. Images of the “Notorious RBG” usually show her in Supreme Court robes with the kind of stylish white collar the justice favored, and fans can now buy or get knitting patterns for the collar online. This cult following really grew in the new millennium, when Ginsburg developed a reput…
What It Took to Win
What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party is timely and ambitious. Many observers have expressed real doubts about the ability of the Democratic Party to win elections because of (but certainly not limited to) the poorly handled 2020 census, state voter-suppression laws, Supreme Court decisions upholding those laws, and partisan gerrymandering. But Michael Kazin takes a refreshingly different approach. What It Took to Win offers a sw…
The Industrialists
Journal Article The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism Get access The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism. By Jennifer A Delton. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. xiv, 342 pp. Cloth, $45.00. Paper, $32.00.) Elizabeth Shermer Elizabeth Shermer Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, Illinois Search for other works by this author on: O…
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd. Resistance from the Right
Political science (25 works) · Law (21 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (15 works) · Sociology (13 works) · History (10 works) · Political economy (8 works) · American History and Culture (7 works) · Economics (7 works) · Race, History, and American Society (7 works)