Erik Loomis

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Erik Loomis (* 1974 in Oregon ) is an American historian.

Loomis comes from a family of lumberjacks in Oregon. He graduated from the University of Oregon with a bachelor's degree in 1968, the University of Tennessee with a master's degree in 1999, and received his PhD from the University of New Mexico in 2008 . He is an Associate Professor at the University of Rhode Island .

Loomis deals with the history of the labor movement also in connection with exploitation of the environment in the USA, history of environmental protection in the USA, with the history of global capitalism and the American West.

He experienced in his youth in the 1980s one of the most violent conflicts between environmentalists, the nature and particularly the spotted owl ( Northern Spotted Owl , Strix occidentalis caurina wanted to protect), and workers and employers of the timber industry in the American Northwest.

In his book American History in Ten Strikes , which deals with American labor and social history through the analysis of ten strikes. As the main conclusion of his book, he sees the inseparability of the fight against discrimination against races, immigrants and women and the fight for economic equality. He also points out that short and long-term successes of the working class in the United States came only when they could count on government support and sympathy, as in the New Deal under Franklin Delano Roosevelt after a period of brutally suppressed labor struggles in the 1920s. As another politician of the time, he highlights Frank Murphy , who, as governor of Michigan, refused to use the National Guard against striking workers at General Motors. According to Loomis, in American history the government and employers have mostly allied themselves to suppress workers and the only way to counter this is, in his view, to elect an active trade union movement and representatives of workers' interests into politics and then to measure them against it and to make them responsible do. According to Loomis, the change in the New Deal was only possible through strong and politically active unions. He sees the current situation in the USA as comparable to the suppression of the trade unions and workers in the 1920s, including in the rulings of the Supreme Court.

In his book Out of Sight , he describes the efforts of large companies to outsource environmental catastrophes to developing countries in search of cheap labor for their production. This was the subject of several publications by him.

He is active against the exploitation of prisoners in the US as what he calls work slaves and supported the 2018 national prisoner strike in the New York Times.

He has a blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money on the history of the labor and environmental movements. He also published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Dissent, and New Republic.

Fonts

Books:

  • Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests, Cambridge University Press, 2016
  • Out of Sight: The Long and Disturbing Story of Corporations Outsourcing Catastrophe, The New Press, 2015
  • No Retreat, No Surrender: American History in Ten Strikes, The New Press 2018

Some essays:

  • When Loggers Were Green: Lumber, Labor, and Conservation, 1937-48 , Western Historical Quarterly, November 2015
  • Reforestation Cooperatives and Countercultural Work in Northwestern Forests, 1970-1985 , Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Winter 2015
  • High Winds and Sun: Southeastern Colorado and the Dust Bowl , Colorado Heritage, September / October 2013, pp. 16-19.
  • Preserving Nature to Preserve the Republic: Laurens Bolles, New Mexico's Cold War Conservationist, New Mexico Historical Review, Volume 88, No. 3, Winter 2013, pp. 41-64.
  • with Ryan H. Edgington: Lives Under the Canopy: Spotted Owls and Loggers in Western Forests, Natural Resources Journal, Volume 52, Spring 2012, pp. 99-134.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Birth dates in the introduction to his book Empire of Timber
  2. ^ Serving Time Should Not Mean Prison Slavery , New York Times, Aug. 30, 2018

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personal data
SURNAME Loomis, Erik
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American historian
DATE OF BIRTH 1974
PLACE OF BIRTH Oregon