Daniel Opler, PhD
Chair
Associate Professor of History
PhD, New York University
BA, Columbia University
Areas of Interest
- History of class
- Radicalism
- Gender
- Consumption
- Women in America
Courses
- HIST 203 Witches, Slaves, and Rebels: Inequality in Early America
- HIST 214 Shaping of the Modern World
- HIST 309 U.S.: Colonies to the Civil War
- HIST 310 U.S.: Civil War to the Present
- INTG 333 Contemporary History Through Film
- HIST 341 Reconstruction to the Progressive Era
- HIST 346 America from the Roaring Twenties to World War II
- HIST 450 U.S.: History of New York City
- HIST 455 Women in American History
- WMNS 300 Intro to Women’s Studies
Presentations
“Counter Revolution: Anti-Communism, Labor, and the Rise of Self-Service in New York City, 1948-1953,” the Self-Service Revolution in Retailing panel, Business History Conference, Toronto, Canada, June 2006
“Creating A Cultural Front: Labor and Radical Cultures in New York City’s Department Store Unions, 1934-41,” Culture, Activism, and Power: Social Reform and Strategies for Change panel, American Studies Association Annual Conference, Atlanta, Ga., November 2004
“Exclusions and Inclusions: Constructing/Confronting Cultural Violence in the Plantation Fiction of Postbellum America,” American Studies Association Annual Conference, Hartford, Conn., October 2003
“Communism and Consumption in Union Square, 1930-35,” Site of Memory and Contestation: New York City’s Union Square and American Social Movements in the Twentieth Century panel, History Matters Conference, New York, N.Y., May 2003
“Putting The Ax Into Working-Class Literature: Satire, Class, and Donald E. Westlake’s The Ax,” Contemporary Working-Class Literature panel, American Literature Association Annual Conference, Cambridge, Mass., May 2003
“‘Barbara Hutton, She Gets Mutton! Woolworth Workers, They Get Nothing!’: The Gendered Narratives of the 1937 New York City Five-and-Dime Sit-Down Strikes,” New Voices in Labor History panel, North American Labor History Association Annual Conference, Detroit, Mich., October 2002
Publications
“Music from the Vanguard: The Songs of the Composers’ Collective of New York, 1933-1936,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 10:2 (2016), 123-152
For All White-Collar Workers: The Possibilities of Radicalism in New York City’s Department Store Unions, 1934-53, Ohio State University Press, 2007
“Monkey Business in Union Square: A Cultural Analysis of the Klein’s-Ohrbach’s Strikes of 1934-5,” Journal of Social History, Fall 2002
“On The Popular Front: New York City’s Department Store Union Culture, 1937-1941,” Mickle Street Review: An Electronic Journal of Whitman and American Studies, November 2004
“Between the ‘Other’ Classes: The Nanny and the Ideological Creation of the American Middle Class,” Cercles, 8, 68-77, 2003
Book review: “Race, Class and Teachers’ Unions,” Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis, and Steve Golin, Hopes on the Line: The Newark Teachers Strikes, Radical Teacher 71, 4-7, 2004
Davis Joyce, Howard Zinn: A Radical American Vision, Cercles, July 2004
Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Blacklisted: The Film Lover’s Guide to the Hollywood Blacklist, Cercles, January 2004
Judith Nies, Nine Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition, Cercles, February 2004
Jedediah Purdy, Being America: Liberty, Violence, and Commerce in an American World, Cercles, October 2003
Peter Stoneley, Consumerism and American Girls’ Literature, 1860-1940, Cercles, May 2003