Leon Fink
Biographic Data
| ID | 3772107 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Leon Fink |
| GIVEN NAMES | Leon |
| FAMILY NAME | Fink |
| SIGNATURE | FINK L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Chicago |
| ORCID | 0009-0009-8522-6642 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 29 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Wisdom of Hanna Silver: Jewish Survival and Social-Democratic Faith in Holocaust-Era Berlin
Survival narratives from the Holocaust are universally poignant and filled with tragedy, but they also vary in unexpected and noteworthy ways. As one of a few thousand so-called U-boaters, Hanna Bornowski Silver stayed in place with her mother throughout the war and ultimately connected to a larger Berlin-centred circle of survivors, both Jews and non-Jews. Most distinctive about this story in comparison to other treatments on the subject, howeve…
Labor Justice Across the Americas
A Slave in Uncle Sam’s Service”: Labor and Resistance in the US Army, 1865–1890
Enlisted men were an essential source of labor in the nineteenth-century United States. Troops built infrastructure, surveyed and scouted territory, and provided services to private companies, especially railroads. They contributed in significant ways to the expansion of private investment and the extension of state power across the trans-Mississippi West. Yet soldiers have been largely absent from US labor history. This essay examines the Americ…
Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism ed. by Carol Williams
In a recent editorial for Daily Kos, Denise Oliver Velez observed, “We still learn little of Native Americans in our history classes, and of Ndn [Indian] women, not much beyond Pocahontas and Sacagawea. Rarely is that history linked to living Native American women and their contemporary lives and struggles. Some historians, activists and Native American and Women’s Studies scholars are trying to change that and are beginning to teach the history …
Labour and the Decolonization Struggle in Trinidad and Tobago by Jerome Teelucksingh
Jerome Teelucksingh’s Labour and the Decolonization Struggle in Trinidad and Tobago argues that workers in the labor movement, rather than middle-class politicians or benevolent British colonists, were the central protagonists in the fight for Trinidadian independence. This book begins in the late nineteenth century and traces the organized labor movement in Trinidad and Tobago up until the postwar era and the origins of the short-lived British W…
Women Ask Relief for Puerto Ricans”: Territorial Citizenship, the Social Security Act, and Puerto Rican Communities, 1933–1939
In the 1930s, social workers employed by New Deal agencies in Puerto Rico played central roles in advocating for the coverage of Puerto Rico under new federal social welfare provisions. These social workers fought for the island to be included under the Social Security Act of 1935 by building political coalitions to petition the US Congress for inclusion. Territorial law allowed the US Congress to determine on a case-by-case basis how to administ…
Contesting Independence: The Decolonization of Korean Labor Under US Occupation, 1945–1948
The end of Japanese colonial rule ushered in a moment of both promise and uncertainty for Korean workers. Even as they shared hopes for labor rights and social justice, workers were divided over the meaning of independence and how it would be actualized in a liberated Korea. This moment of possibilities was quickly foreclosed by the American occupation, which turned a complex and fragmented labor movement into an undifferentiated communist bloc. …
Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito by Sherwin K. Bryant
In this theoretically engaging and powerfully argued study, Sherwin K. Bryant proposes that the history of colonial Quito cannot be understood outside the perspective of slavery and that slavery was, in fact, “quintessential” to Spanish and Catholic governance of the colony (146). Mention of the word slavery immediately conjures up images of chattel labor, but Bryant spends surprisingly few pages discussing the work of slaves, a task undertaken b…
Slave Families and the Hato Economy in Puerto Rico by David M. Stark
This is an important book for Puerto Rican and Caribbean history as well as for comparative slave studies in the Americas. It is the first thorough examination of a period in the socioeconomic history of Puerto Rico that, if not entirely neglected, has been murky at best for lack of systematic exploration of primary-source documentation. Additionally, there have been overarching generalizations about a supposedly isolated and subsistence-oriented…
Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness by April Merleaux
In writing Sugar and Civilization, April Merleaux takes on an ambitious project: telling the history of the US sugar empire from 1898 up to World War II. During this period, the United States assumed control over its own overseas sugar empire while continental producers in the United States expanded production of sugar beet, setting up a series of battles over the meaning of sugar and the making of American empire. Merleaux details these battles …
Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 by Gregory E. O’Malley
The concept of the Middle Passage has become an iconic image within historical discourses on the Atlantic slave trade, which, according to the latest detailed calculations, accounted for the forced removal of at least 12.5 million enslaved Africans from their home continent between 1500 and 1867. Of those who survived the perilous Atlantic crossing, most would spend their lives laboring in the West Indies, Brazil, and the United States to produce…
Domestic Containment in the Marshall Islands: Making a Home for Cold War Workers in the US Imperial Pacific
During the Cold War, the US military transformed the Marshallese Island Kwajalein into a missile range to test intercontinental ballistic missiles. To recruit American knowledge workers who would move their families to the central Pacific to operate the base, the military erected a suburban landscape on Kwajalein. Fulfillment of the promise to American knowledge workers that they could find home on Kwajalein entailed not only erecting a refuge mi…
Toxic Injustice: A Transnational History of Exposure and Struggle by Susanna Rankin Bohme
Toxic Injustice is an exceptionally fascinating and transnational history of the birth and slow death of DBCP (dibromochloropropane). Designed by Dow and Shell in the 1950s, DBCP was widely used in agriculture as a pesticide during the 1960s and 1970s in both the United States and Central America despite early indications that it was dangerous to human health. DBCP then achieved worldwide notoriety in the 1970s and 1980s as a global campaign reve…
Connecting to Activists and the Public through the Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project
Brrrrinnnggg. Brrrrinnnggg. “Max?” asked the raspy voice on the other end of the line. I answered in the affirmative. “This is Becky Moeller.” It’s not every day that you get a call from the president of the Texas AFL-CIO. I gulped. “I’ve got some people here that you need to meet.” Moeller was in her car heading home from a convention of the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI), a gathering in which she had joined veteran African American union a…
Black Flag Boricuas: Anarchism, Antiauthoritarianism, and the Left in Puerto Rico, 1897–1921 by Kirwin Shaffer
The Spanish carpenter Santiago Iglesias Pantín’s life provides a compelling template for the transformation of the Puerto Rican labor movement from the turn of the twentieth century to the Bolshevik Revolution and second Red Scare. From his anarchist activism in Cuba’s labor movement during the 1880s, his central role in the creation of the Federación Regional de los Trabajadores (FRT), and the founding of the Partido Obrero Socialista in the 189…
Work, Class, and Power in the Borderlands of the Early American Pacific: The Labors of Empire by Evan Lampe
Scholars have long explored history “from the bottom up,” but relatively few have embraced that approach to examine workers in the Pacific during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this interesting albeit less than stellar study, Evan Lampe looks at many occupational groups whose labor helped form an American empire. As the author makes clear, these groups were part of an international working class whose experiences and outlo…
Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire by Abigail L. Swingen
Abigail L. Swingen’s new book begins with a simple question: “Why did England establish and maintain an empire in the Americas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?” (1). This deceptively simple query is posed in full knowledge of the fact that scholars have variously concluded that the colonies either grew up willy-nilly as the product of the initiative of disparate groups often left to their own devices or were the product of a coher…
The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Michele Reid-Vazquez
In 1844 an unprecedented wave of violence engulfed the island of Cuba. “The Year of the Lash,” as it came to be known, was one of the darkest moments in the history of Atlantic slavery. In March, May, and November 1843, a series of slave revolts had broken out across the island. Accusations were raised of an alliance of free people of color, enslaved men and women, creole dissidents, and British abolitionists. In order to “root out” the conspirac…
Resisting the “Enslaving Design”: Conscription and the Radical Politics of the Body in England’s Atlantic Empire, Circa 1647–1660
Over the course of the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution, the English state made forced military labor an essential technology of empire building through a political process forged in conflict. The political stakes here were high, as resistance to the press for soldiers and sailors, animated by radical republican principles linking bodily liberty to popular sovereignty, sparked two constitutional crises during the last decade of the Engl…
With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of an American Maritime Empire by Brian Rouleau
In the 1960s, Jesse Lemisch’s Jack Tar swaggered into the world of American history like a “bull in a china shop,” stowed his kit and tools there, and took up residence. Hidden in plain sight on the orlop deck, in the forepeak, and at the crosstrees, this American sailor and his shipmates had been of less interest to previous historians than were the officers who commanded them. Rank-and-file mariners had too often found themselves consigned by h…
Disease, Resistance, and Lies: The Demise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Brazil and Cuba by Dale Graden
In 1849, just a year before Brazilian politicians acted to suppress the illegal slave trade to their country, two of them died following an outbreak of yellow fever introduced into the state of Bahia by infected mariners. Readers of this intriguing and innovative book by Dale Graden will not shed any tears for Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos and the Viscount of Maché: Both men fervently defended the slave trade and opposed efforts to stop it. How…
Empire, Nature, and the Labor of Coal: Colombia in the Twenty-First Century
A twenty-first-century coal mine in Colombia reveals much about labor and empire in Latin America. To the extent that modern empire has been a project of extraction of mineral and agricultural commodities, it has also been a project of exerting imperial control over labor and nature. This essay puts nature at the center of the study of labor and empire, to examine how humans’ relationships with the natural world shaped, and were shaped by, imperi…
Building an Occupation: Puerto Rican Laborers in the Dominican Republic, 1916–1924
This article details US officials’ mobilization of Puerto Rican labor during the occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–1924) and the consequences for transnational working-class solidarity. It argues that the military government relied on Puerto Ricans as both imperial laborers and role models whose presumed cultural affinities with the Dominican populace would forestall resistance and contribute to efforts to reform Dominican society. Yet t…
Building Empire’s Archipelago: The Imperial Politics of Filipino Labor in the Pacific
This article illustrates how the work of low-wage Filipino laborers fortified the US military’s imperial grasp on the Pacific and generated profit for American businesses. I argue that the hiring of Filipino laborers for work on US military installations deepened an existing transpacific migration pattern whereby state and capital interests collaborated to control, and ultimately exploit, the labor of Filipinos. This Pacific-wide circulation of F…
Straw Hill
Empire, Nature, and the Labor of Coal: Colombia in the Twenty-First Century
A twenty-first-century coal mine in Colombia reveals much about labor and empire in Latin America. To the extent that modern empire has been a project of extraction of mineral and agricultural commodities, it has also been a project of exerting imperial control over labor and nature. This essay puts nature at the center of the study of labor and empire, to examine how humans’ relationships with the natural world shaped, and were shaped by, imperi…
Women Ask Relief for Puerto Ricans”: Territorial Citizenship, the Social Security Act, and Puerto Rican Communities, 1933–1939
In the 1930s, social workers employed by New Deal agencies in Puerto Rico played central roles in advocating for the coverage of Puerto Rico under new federal social welfare provisions. These social workers fought for the island to be included under the Social Security Act of 1935 by building political coalitions to petition the US Congress for inclusion. Territorial law allowed the US Congress to determine on a case-by-case basis how to administ…
Class Conflict in the Gilded Age: The Figure and the Phantom
Research Article| October 01 1975 CLASS CONFLICT IN THE GILDED AGE: THE FIGURE AND THE PHANTOM Leon Fink Leon Fink Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (1975) 1975 (9-10): 56–73. https://doi.org/10.1215/1636545-1975-9-10-56 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Leon Fink; CLASS CONFLICT IN THE GILDED AGE: THE FIGURE AND THE PHANTOM. Radical History Review 1 October 19…
On Herbert Gutman's 'The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom
Research Article| May 01 1977 On Herbert Gutman’s ‘The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom’ Leon Fink; Leon Fink Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google George Rawick; George Rawick Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Evelyn Brooks Barnett Evelyn Brooks Barnett Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (1977) 1977 (14-15): 76–108. https://doi.org/10.1215/1636545-197…
Workingmen's democracy: The Knights of Labor and American politics
The Undoing of the Intellectuals
The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South
"The arrival of several hundred Guatemalan-born workers in a Morganton, North Carolina, poultry plant sets the stage for this dramatic story of human struggle in an age of globalization. Virtually overnight, a once quiet industrial center nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains finds itself the new home to one of the hemisphere's oldest cultures - and to a protracted struggle for social justice.". "When workers' concerns about safety…
Workers Across the Americas
This book presents the first broad intellectual response by labor and working-class historians to the larger transnational turn in historical studies. Drawing on an international conference of U.S., Canadian, Latin American, and Caribbean scholars, the book brings together emerging studies on workers, the state, and international labor activism and institutions. Fourteen chapters, each transnational in scope, address themes of indigenous peoples …
Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History
The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order
Presenting a new twist on classic themes of American economic and working-class history, The Long Gilded Age considers the interlocking roles of politics, labor, and internationalism in the ideologies and institutions that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century
A Slave in Uncle Sam’s Service”: Labor and Resistance in the US Army, 1865–1890
Enlisted men were an essential source of labor in the nineteenth-century United States. Troops built infrastructure, surveyed and scouted territory, and provided services to private companies, especially railroads. They contributed in significant ways to the expansion of private investment and the extension of state power across the trans-Mississippi West. Yet soldiers have been largely absent from US labor history. This essay examines the Americ…
Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism ed. by Carol Williams
In a recent editorial for Daily Kos, Denise Oliver Velez observed, “We still learn little of Native Americans in our history classes, and of Ndn [Indian] women, not much beyond Pocahontas and Sacagawea. Rarely is that history linked to living Native American women and their contemporary lives and struggles. Some historians, activists and Native American and Women’s Studies scholars are trying to change that and are beginning to teach the history …
Labour and the Decolonization Struggle in Trinidad and Tobago by Jerome Teelucksingh
Jerome Teelucksingh’s Labour and the Decolonization Struggle in Trinidad and Tobago argues that workers in the labor movement, rather than middle-class politicians or benevolent British colonists, were the central protagonists in the fight for Trinidadian independence. This book begins in the late nineteenth century and traces the organized labor movement in Trinidad and Tobago up until the postwar era and the origins of the short-lived British W…
Women Ask Relief for Puerto Ricans”: Territorial Citizenship, the Social Security Act, and Puerto Rican Communities, 1933–1939
In the 1930s, social workers employed by New Deal agencies in Puerto Rico played central roles in advocating for the coverage of Puerto Rico under new federal social welfare provisions. These social workers fought for the island to be included under the Social Security Act of 1935 by building political coalitions to petition the US Congress for inclusion. Territorial law allowed the US Congress to determine on a case-by-case basis how to administ…
Contesting Independence: The Decolonization of Korean Labor Under US Occupation, 1945–1948
The end of Japanese colonial rule ushered in a moment of both promise and uncertainty for Korean workers. Even as they shared hopes for labor rights and social justice, workers were divided over the meaning of independence and how it would be actualized in a liberated Korea. This moment of possibilities was quickly foreclosed by the American occupation, which turned a complex and fragmented labor movement into an undifferentiated communist bloc. …
Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito by Sherwin K. Bryant
In this theoretically engaging and powerfully argued study, Sherwin K. Bryant proposes that the history of colonial Quito cannot be understood outside the perspective of slavery and that slavery was, in fact, “quintessential” to Spanish and Catholic governance of the colony (146). Mention of the word slavery immediately conjures up images of chattel labor, but Bryant spends surprisingly few pages discussing the work of slaves, a task undertaken b…
Slave Families and the Hato Economy in Puerto Rico by David M. Stark
This is an important book for Puerto Rican and Caribbean history as well as for comparative slave studies in the Americas. It is the first thorough examination of a period in the socioeconomic history of Puerto Rico that, if not entirely neglected, has been murky at best for lack of systematic exploration of primary-source documentation. Additionally, there have been overarching generalizations about a supposedly isolated and subsistence-oriented…
Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness by April Merleaux
In writing Sugar and Civilization, April Merleaux takes on an ambitious project: telling the history of the US sugar empire from 1898 up to World War II. During this period, the United States assumed control over its own overseas sugar empire while continental producers in the United States expanded production of sugar beet, setting up a series of battles over the meaning of sugar and the making of American empire. Merleaux details these battles …
Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 by Gregory E. O’Malley
The concept of the Middle Passage has become an iconic image within historical discourses on the Atlantic slave trade, which, according to the latest detailed calculations, accounted for the forced removal of at least 12.5 million enslaved Africans from their home continent between 1500 and 1867. Of those who survived the perilous Atlantic crossing, most would spend their lives laboring in the West Indies, Brazil, and the United States to produce…
Domestic Containment in the Marshall Islands: Making a Home for Cold War Workers in the US Imperial Pacific
During the Cold War, the US military transformed the Marshallese Island Kwajalein into a missile range to test intercontinental ballistic missiles. To recruit American knowledge workers who would move their families to the central Pacific to operate the base, the military erected a suburban landscape on Kwajalein. Fulfillment of the promise to American knowledge workers that they could find home on Kwajalein entailed not only erecting a refuge mi…
Toxic Injustice: A Transnational History of Exposure and Struggle by Susanna Rankin Bohme
Toxic Injustice is an exceptionally fascinating and transnational history of the birth and slow death of DBCP (dibromochloropropane). Designed by Dow and Shell in the 1950s, DBCP was widely used in agriculture as a pesticide during the 1960s and 1970s in both the United States and Central America despite early indications that it was dangerous to human health. DBCP then achieved worldwide notoriety in the 1970s and 1980s as a global campaign reve…
Connecting to Activists and the Public through the Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project
Brrrrinnnggg. Brrrrinnnggg. “Max?” asked the raspy voice on the other end of the line. I answered in the affirmative. “This is Becky Moeller.” It’s not every day that you get a call from the president of the Texas AFL-CIO. I gulped. “I’ve got some people here that you need to meet.” Moeller was in her car heading home from a convention of the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI), a gathering in which she had joined veteran African American union a…
Black Flag Boricuas: Anarchism, Antiauthoritarianism, and the Left in Puerto Rico, 1897–1921 by Kirwin Shaffer
The Spanish carpenter Santiago Iglesias Pantín’s life provides a compelling template for the transformation of the Puerto Rican labor movement from the turn of the twentieth century to the Bolshevik Revolution and second Red Scare. From his anarchist activism in Cuba’s labor movement during the 1880s, his central role in the creation of the Federación Regional de los Trabajadores (FRT), and the founding of the Partido Obrero Socialista in the 189…
Work, Class, and Power in the Borderlands of the Early American Pacific: The Labors of Empire by Evan Lampe
Scholars have long explored history “from the bottom up,” but relatively few have embraced that approach to examine workers in the Pacific during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this interesting albeit less than stellar study, Evan Lampe looks at many occupational groups whose labor helped form an American empire. As the author makes clear, these groups were part of an international working class whose experiences and outlo…
Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire by Abigail L. Swingen
Abigail L. Swingen’s new book begins with a simple question: “Why did England establish and maintain an empire in the Americas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?” (1). This deceptively simple query is posed in full knowledge of the fact that scholars have variously concluded that the colonies either grew up willy-nilly as the product of the initiative of disparate groups often left to their own devices or were the product of a coher…
The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World by Michele Reid-Vazquez
In 1844 an unprecedented wave of violence engulfed the island of Cuba. “The Year of the Lash,” as it came to be known, was one of the darkest moments in the history of Atlantic slavery. In March, May, and November 1843, a series of slave revolts had broken out across the island. Accusations were raised of an alliance of free people of color, enslaved men and women, creole dissidents, and British abolitionists. In order to “root out” the conspirac…
Resisting the “Enslaving Design”: Conscription and the Radical Politics of the Body in England’s Atlantic Empire, Circa 1647–1660
Over the course of the mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution, the English state made forced military labor an essential technology of empire building through a political process forged in conflict. The political stakes here were high, as resistance to the press for soldiers and sailors, animated by radical republican principles linking bodily liberty to popular sovereignty, sparked two constitutional crises during the last decade of the Engl…
Political science (29 works) · History (28 works) · Law (26 works) · History (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (21 works) · Politics (17 works) · Economic history (15 works) · Empire (12 works) · Art (10 works)