Joe William Trotter

Biographic Data

ID175095
NAMEJoe William Trotter
GIVEN NAMESJoe William
FAMILY NAMETrotter
SIGNATURETROTTER J W
AFFILIATIONSCarnegie Mellon University
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS71
TOTAL CITATIONS47
AUTHOR COUNT70
EDITOR COUNT1
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1986
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX4

  • No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era

    Joe William TrotterARTICLELabor Studies in Working-Class…2026

    This Pulitzer Prize–winning volume will no doubt help to frame the study of Civil War–era African American and US urban, labor, and political history for years to come. Focusing on the lives of Black workers in the principal Massachusetts Bay city, this book offers a model study of working-class Black life and labor during the most fraught and conflicted moment in the nation’s history. Alongside detailed analyses of a wide range of Civil War–era …

  • Interrogating the Notion of a “Black City: Past, Present, and Future

    Open AccessJoe William TrotterARTICLEJournal of Urban History2025

    Recent scholarship illuminates the many ways that Black people have shaped the built environment of American cities, while also double taxing their labor to build institutional infrastructure to serve their own class and racially segregated communities. Yet, the notion of a “Black City” is the subject of significant debate, partly because people of African descent have never fully controlled the cities in which they lived, worked, and helped to c…

  • Building the Black City: Expanding the Case for Reparations for Descendants of African People Enslaved in America

    Open AccessJoe William TrotterARTICLEJournal of Urban History2025

    Recent scholarship illuminates the many ways that Black people have shaped the built environment of American cities, while also double taxing their labor to build institutional infrastructure to serve their own class and racially segregated communities. Yet, the notion of a “Black City” is the subject of significant debate, partly because people of African descent have never fully controlled the cities in which they lived, worked, and helped to c…

  • Expanding the scope of reparations demands

    Joe William TrotterARTICLEEthnic and Racial Studies2025Cited by: 2References: 5

  • Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

    Joe William TrotterARTICLELabor Studies in Working-Class…2023

    It is a pleasure to join this fiftieth anniversary celebration of historian Herbert G. Gutman's seminal collection of essays, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America. Historians of US and African American urban, labor, and working-class history owe a special debt to Gutman's groundbreaking essay on the Black coal miner and labor leader Richard L. Davis, “The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America.” This essay was first read as…

  • Cicero M. Fain. Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story

    Open AccessJoe William TrotterARTICLEThe American Historical Review2023

    Journal Article Cicero M. Fain. Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story. Get access Cicero M. Fain. Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019. Pp. ix, 244. Cloth $110.00, paper $27.95, e-book $14.95. Joe William Trotter Joe William Trotter Carnegie Mellon University Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volum…

  • Special Issue “More Expendable than ‘Essential’: Black Workers’ Rights and Racial Class Struggles Under the Covid Crisis”

    Open AccessJoe William TrotterARTICLELabor Studies Journal2022References: 2

  • A Forum on the Politics of Skills

    Open AccessPaul Osterman, Nichola Lowe et al.ARTICLEIndustrial and Labor Relations…2022Cited by: 3References: 28

    The ILR Review invited this group of scholars who work within the fields of sociology, history, and urban planning to share their perspective on the politics of skills. We called on their expertise to draw attention to the politics that drive the definition and development of skill and its use in shaping the rights and voice of workers. The essays in this forum explore the politics of skill along three lines. First, they interrogate the definitio…

  • Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement: A Century of Social Service and Activism

    Joe William Trotter, Dick GilbreathBOOKPittsburgh and the Urban League…2020

  • Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement: A Century of Social Service and Activism

    Joe William Trotter, Dick GilbreathBOOKPittsburgh and the Urban League…2020

    During the Great Migration, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became a mecca for African Americans seeking better job opportunities, wages, and living conditions. The city's thriving economy and vibrant social and cultural scenes inspired dreams of prosperity and a new start, but this urban haven was not free of discrimination and despair. In the face of injustice, activists formed the Urban League of Pittsburgh (ULP) in 1918 to combat prejudice and supp…

  • African American Urban Electoral Politics in the Age of Jim Crow

    Open AccessLisa G Materson, Joe William TrotterARTICLEJournal of Urban History2018

    This article reviews the literature on black politics in the United States during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that with notable exceptions, the expanding corpus of scholarship on black politics has largely focused on grassroots organizing and social movements, making electoral politics a secondary force in the history of African Americans. This critique of recent scholarship frames and introduces four articles in this s…

  • O Papel Do Governo Na Segregação Racial Da Moradia Nos Estados Unidos

    Open AccessJoe William Trotter, Jr Joe William TrotterARTICLEAfro-Ásia2018

    .

  • The Ghetto in Global History: 1500 To the Present

    Joe William Jr Trotter, Wendy Z Goldman et al.BOOKGhetto in Global History2017

  • The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom

    Joe William TrotterARTICLEJournal of American History2016Cited by: 2

    Journal Article The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom Get access By James Green. (New York: Grove, 2015. viii, 440 pp. $28.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 103, Issue 1, June 2016, Pages 207–208, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaw077 Published: 01 June 2016

  • Contesting the Postwar City: Working-Class and Growth Politics in 1940s Milwaukee

    Joe William TrotterARTICLESocial History2015

    In the decade and a half following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, research on American political history has shifted towards greater emphasis on the history of ‘conse

  • The Dynamics of Race and Ethnicity in the US Coal Industry

    Open AccessJoe William TrotterARTICLEInternational Review of Social…2015Cited by: 3References: 6

    By the turn of the twenty-first century, scholars had transformed our understanding of class, race, and ethnicity in the rise and demise of the US coal industry. Under the twin impact of the modern Black Freedom Movement and the rise of the New Labor History, studies of American labor and race relations fragmented during the late twentieth century. Following the lead of pioneering labor historian Herbert Gutman, one influential body of scholarshi…

  • African American Migration from the Colonial Era to the Present

    Joe William Trotter, Ronald H BayorBOOKOxford Handbook of American…2014

    This essay explores several overlapping waves of black population movement from the African background through the early twenty-first century. It shows how enslaved people dominated the first two great migrations—from Africa to the tobacco-producing colonies of British North America and later from the Upper South to the cotton-producing lands of the Deep South. In the wake of the Civil War and the emancipation of some 4 million enslaved people, t…

  • The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations

    Joe William TrotterARTICLEJournal of American Ethnic History2013Cited by: 1

    Book Review| January 01 2013 The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations. By Ira Berlin. New York: Viking Press, Penguin Group, 2010. 304 pp. Notes and index. $17 (paper). Joe W. Trotter Joe W. Trotter Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2013) 32 (2): 96–97. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.32.2.0096 Cite Icon Cite…

  • The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

    Joe William TrotterARTICLEJournal of American History2011Cited by: 6

    Over the past several decades, scholars have produced a growing range of local and regional case studies of black population movement from the onset of the international slave trade through the late twentieth century. Building on the proliferation of specialized scholarship on the subject, recent studies not only place migrants at the center of black population movements from old to new worlds but also seek more comprehensive treatments of black …

  • Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh since World War II

    Joe William Trotter, Jared N DayBOOKRace and Renaissance2010

  • African American Urban History since World War II

    Kenneth L Kusmer, Joe William TrotterBOOKAfrican American Urban History…2009

    Historians have devoted surprisingly little attention to American urban history of the postwar period, especially compared with earlier decades. Correcting this imbalance, African American Urban History Since World War II features an exciting mix of seasoned scholars and fresh new voices whose combined efforts provide the first comprehensive assessment of this important subject. The first of this volume's five groundbreaking sections focuses on b…

  • Hurricane Katrina: Urban History from the Eye of the Storm

    Open AccessJoe William Trotter, Johanna FernándezARTICLEJournal of Urban History2009Cited by: 2References: 1

    In late August 2005, Hurricane Katrina touched down in the Gulf Coast region of the United States. This massive storm left in its wake death, destruction, and human suffering on a scale and scope that will no doubt make it one of the largest social catastrophes of twenty-first-century American urban history. This disaster soon ignited widespread popular and academic debates over domestic policies dealing with questions of race and class, individu…

  • The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South

    Joe William TrotterARTICLELabor Studies in Working-Class…2007

    Book Review| May 01 2007 The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South William P. Jones Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005 256 pp., $45.00 (cloth); $20.00 (paper) Joe W. Trotter Joe W. Trotter Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2007) 4 (2): 117–118. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2006-068 C…

  • Black Milwaukee: Reflections on the Past Twenty Years

    Open AccessJoe William TrotterARTICLEJournal of Urban History2007Cited by: 3References: 1

    In his response to commentaries on Black Milwaukee, Joe William Trotter Jr. not only provides insight into his own intellectual journey toward a class-based analysis of the black urban community but acknowledges the salient limitations of the proletarianization thesis, particularly vis-à-vis the experiences of black women as outlined by Rhonda Williams. Among the specific arguments of contributors to this volume, however, he gives substantial att…

  • Black Milwaukee: The making of an industrial proletariat, 1915-45

    Joe William TrotterBOOKBlack Milwaukee : the making of…