Profile:
Eric Arnesen specializes in issues of race, labor, and politics in American history. His Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality received the 2001 Wesley-Logan Prize in Diaspora History; his Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923 won the 1991 John H. Dunning Prize in American History. The author of Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents, he is also the editor of The Human Tradition in American Labor History, The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights since Emancipation (forthcoming), editor of the 3-volume Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working Class History, and co-editor of Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience. Arnesen writes regularly for the Chicago Tribune and his review essays have appeared in the Nation , the New Republic , and the Boston Globe ; in 2005 he received the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism from the Society of Midland Authors for “distinguished literary criticism.” He is president of The Historical Society and is currently writing a biography of A. Philip Randolph. In 2006, he held the Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the Swedish Institute for North American Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden .