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Daniel Opler, PhD

Daniel Opler

Chair
Associate Professor of History
PhD, New York University
BA, Columbia University

[email protected]

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