Paul Lawrie

Forging a Laboring Race: The African Worker in the Progressive Imagination

Forging a Laboring Race charts the history of an idea—race management—building on recent work in African American, labor, and disability history to analyze how ideas of race, work, and the “fit” or “unfit” body informed the political economy of early twentieth-century industrial America.

"The Tragic Action and Revolutionary Intent of Black Lives: Historical Genealogies of Cornel West's Prophetic Pragmatism in Post-Racial America" in Truth in the Public Sphere, 63-77

"Race, Work and Disability in Progressive Era America" in The Oxford Handbook of Disability History, 350-371

Throughout U.S. history, the production of difference, whether along racial or disability lines, has been inextricably tied to the imperatives of labor economy. From the plantations of the antebellum era through the assembly lines and trenches of early-twentieth-century America, ideologies of race and disability have delineated which peoples could do which kinds of work. The […]

"Mortality as the Life Story of a People: Fredrick L. Hoffman and Actuarial Narratives of African American Extinction, 1896-1915" in Canadian Review of American Studies, 43 (3), 352-387.

"'Salvaging the Negro': Vocational Rehabilitation and African American Veterans 1917-1924" in Disability Histories, 321-344