Research Seminars

2024 - 2025 Series -- View Series PDF

• February 5, 2025: Maia Silber, “The ‘Stay-Overs’: Seasonal Farm Labor Migration and Public Employment Agencies, 1931-1973”

  This chapter of Silber's dissertation in progress traces the history of domestic labor migration between Sanford, Florida, and New York’s Great Lakes region. Beginning in 1931, western New York vegetable growers recruited African American farm laborers from Florida’s “Celery City,” which shares the ecological characteristics that produce “muck” soil around the Great Lakes. Valued for their expertise in the difficult techniques of root vegetable cultivation, migrant farmworkers from Sanford constituted a labor force that was highly skilled and specialized even as it was also low-waged and exploited.

• March 26, 2025: Che Yuen, “She’s a Killer”: Aerosols, Insecticides, and the Postwar American Home

  First introduced to the American public as military equipment in 1942, aerosol insecticides offered unprecedented control and conquest of mosquitos and malaria in the Pacific theater. Celebrated for their efficacy and convenience, these aerosol “bug bombs” would continue their heroic ascendance after WWII, reimagined as a consumer product for cleaning and maintaining the modern American home.

• April 23, 2025: Christopher Morris, “Nitrogen, Inc.: Global Chemical Conglomerates and the Little Guy”

  The transformation of nitrogen from a scarce, expensive commodity that came from overseas to abundant, cheap commodity produced at home transformed the world for farmers. Morris' project tells that story from the bottom up, through the life of Ned Cobb, a little guy whose life was forever changed, for better and for worse, by the rise of a big American agro-chemical industry.