Leon Fink

The essays also cover the development of labor history in the United States from its inception in the 1880s as history through the institutionalist period to the "new labor history" period in vogue today.

It concludes with an examination of the role history, culture, art and social movements play in American labor history and why scholars must focus on these factors in addition to workers and their organizations.

Leon Fink (born January 9, 1948) is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

A historian, his research and writing focuses on labor unions in the United States, immigration and the nature of work He is the founding editor of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, the premier journal of labor history in the United States.

Fink was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1948.

While at Harvard, he spent the 1968-1969 term studying at the Centre for the Study of Social History at the University of Warwick in Coventry, U.K.

He received his B.A degree from Harvard University in 1970.

He obtained his master's degree in 1971 and his doctorate in 1977, both from the University of Rochester, where he studied with Herbert Gutman.

After obtaining his master's degree, from 1972 to 1974 Fink was a lecturer in the Department of History at the City College of New York.

From 1983 to 1984, Fink was a Fulbright Program scholar at the Amerika-Institut at the University of Munich in West Germany.

In 1985, Fink was appointed an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).

He became a full professor in 1990 and Zachary Smith Professor of History in 1995.

In 1991, Fink and UNC professor Lloyd Kramer founded the UNC Project for Historical Education (PHE).

The program sponsors workshops on teaching history for elementary and secondary public school social studies teachers.

The workshops focus on recent developments in historical research, strategies for integrating research into lesson plans, how to use primary documents in teaching, and other aspects of teaching history.

Fink's 1994 book, In Search of the Working Class: Essays in American Labor History and Political Culture, drew attention for its focus on the role of the historian.

The essays in the book highlight the role of the historian as an outside observer of a basic unit of culture and economics as the worker, and what constitutes the "working class."

Fink's third book, 1998's Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment, drew attention in the field of history for its focus on the tension which arises when educated historians study relatively uneducated workers.

Using biographies of some of the top labor historians and intellectuals in the field of labor studies, Fink illustrated the problems which can arise when historians try to learn from workers at the same time that they attempt to advise them.

1998 was a year of many honors for Fink.

He was appointed to the National Advisory Board of the Society for History Education, was named a fellow at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, and was named to the Organization of American Historians' (OAH) Merle Curti Prize Committee.

That same year, he was elected to a three-year term as a vice president for the American Historical Association's (AHA) Teaching Division.

In 1999, Fink established the "Listening for a Change" initiative at the Southern Oral History Program.

"Listening for a Change" was designed to conduct oral histories of workers in order to document the on-the-ground history of the working class.

In its first year, the program conducted 20 interviews with Guatemalan agricultural workers to illuminate how the influx of Hispanic workers is changing the nature of work in North Carolina.

In 2000, Fink assumed a position as a professor in the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Fink is considered a top scholar in U.S. and comparative labor history.

He is an expert on the history of work, and on labor unions in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.

More recently, his work has focus on the role of immigration historically and in the modern labor movement.

He writes from the perspective of the "new labor history".

In 2000, Fink was named as the AHA's representative on the board of National Council for History Education.

In 2003, Fink helped establish the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas.

Fink had been editor-in-chief of the journal Labor History. In June 2003, Fink and the entire staff left Labor History in a dispute with the journal's publisher, Taylor and Francis.

One editorial board member said the publisher wanted to increase the number of issues a year in order to justify an increase in the subscription price, even though the editorial staff felt there were not enough quality articles to fill additional issues.

In 2006, Fink was a lecturer in the OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program.

Fink is the editor of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History.