Nathan Godfried

PH.D. University of Wisconsin, Madison
My teaching specialty is in twentieth-century American history. I have research interests in the history of mass communication, American labor history, and film history.

My undergraduate classes explore the major political, economic, and social developments of the United States from 1916 to the end of the century. I offer a graduate reading course on twentieth-century American political history and a research seminar on American popular culture.

Representative Publications:

  • “Organic Intellectuals and Working-Class Organizing: The Case of Sarainne Loewe, 1920-38,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 15:1 (Spring 2021): 37-74.
  • “‘Voice of the People’: Sidney Roger, the Labor/Left, and Broadcasting in San Francisco, 1945-1950, American Communist History, 18:1-2 (March-June 2019): 56-78.
  • “Between Human Welfare and National Security:  William S. Gailmor and Popular Front Journalism in the Cold War, 1950-1952,” American Journalism, 34:2 (Spring 2017):  152-178.
  • “Labor Sponsored Film and Working-Class History: The Inheritance (1964),” Film History:  An International Journal, 26:4 (2014).
  • “Labor,” in The Handbook of Communication History (New York:  Routledge, 2013), edited by Peter Simonson, Janice Peck, Robert T. Craig, and John Jackson, Jr., pp. 315-330.
  • “‘Love That AFL-CIO’:  Organized Labor’s Use of Television, 1950-1970,” in A Moment of Danger: Critical Studies in the History of U.S. Communications Since World War II, (Milwaukee, WI:  Marquette University Press, 2011), edited by Janice Peck and Inger Stoler, pp. 153-177.
  • “Fellow Traveler, Organic Intellectual: J. Raymond Walsh and Radio News Commentary in the 1940s,” Democratic Communique, 22:2 (Fall 2008): 19-45.
  • “Revising Labor History for the Cold War: The ILGWU and the Film, With These Hands,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 28:3 (August 2008): 311-333″
  • ‘Fellow Traveler of the Air’: Rod Holmgren and Leftist Radio News Commentary in America’s Cold War,” The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 24:2 (June 2004): 233-51.
  • “Identity, Power, and Local Television: African Americans, Organized Labor, and UHF-TV in Chicago, 1962-1968,” The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 22:2 (June 2002).
  • “Struggling over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD During the 1930s,” Labor History, 42:4 (November 2001): 347-69. (Recipient of 2002 Cathy Covert Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, History Division).
  • WCFL, Chicago’s Voice of Labor, 1926-1978 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).wcfl2
  • Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor: American Economic Development Policy Toward the Arab East, 1942-1949 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987).
  • “Social Unionism and the Popular Front: The Cambridge Union of University Teachers, 1935-1941,” Left History, 24, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2021): 42-76.

Work in Progress:

  • “Fellow Travelers of the Air, 1940-1960,” a study of leftist and radical journalists and broadcasters during the 1940s and 1950s.
  • Activist-Scholars, Unions, and University Politics in the 1930s