James Green (educator) - Academic Career

Academic Career

In the fall of 1970, Green was appointed an assistant professor of history at Brandeis University.

When the magazine Radical America moved from Madison, Wisconsin, to Boston in 1971, Green began writing for the former SDS-run publication, Radical America. A 1974 Radical America article by Green and co-author Allen Hunter outlining the history of school desegregation in Boston prior to the 1974 school-busing crisis, "Racism and Busing in Boston," was widely quoted in the media.

Green received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1972. Green studied under the legendary historian C. Vann Woodward, and became acquainted with the leftist historians Eric Hobsbawm and Herbert Gutman. During this time he also was involved in the anti-war movement, which eventually sparked his interest in the history of radicalism in the United States.

Green took a position as a lecturer in history at the University of Warwick during the 1975 to 1976 term. He became involved in the History Workshop, a group of historians who focused research on workers and local movements rather than national trends, markets and large organizations. Green's subsequent work was heavily influenced by the theories of the History Workshop, and he became an active proponent of the "new labor history" movement in the U.S.

In 1977, Green left Brandeis and was appointed an associate professor of history and labor studies in the College of Public and Community Service at the University of Massachusetts Boston. (He is now a full professor.) In December of that year and into early 1978, Green worked in West Virginia, covering a national strike by coal miners who had defied (for a few days) a Taft-Hartley Act back-to-work order by President Jimmy Carter.

In 1978, Green co-founded the Massachusetts History Workshop with Susan Reverby and Martin Blatt, two other Boston-area labor historians. The project, an exercise in "new labor history," brought workers and academics together to explore labor history and to identify common concerns and issues. He wrote a number of articles on this effort to democratize social history as well as a number of reflections in his autobioraphical book "Taking History to Heart." The project folded in the late 1980s. Oral histories the Workshop collected are now housed at the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

Green's interest in radicalism and his experiences in West Virginia led him to become involved in the American labor movement in the 1980s. In 1981, he created a labor studies major at UMass-Boston, and started teaching leadership training workshops for unions such as the United Mine Workers of America.

In 1987, in addition to continuing on the faculty at UMass-Boston, Green was named a lecturer at the Harvard Trade Union Program (now called the Labor and Worklife Program) at Harvard Law School.

In 1998, Green was named a Fulbright scholar and taught at the University of Genoa in Italy.

In the spring of 2008, Green left the College of Public and Community Service and joined the History Department at University of Massachusetts Boston. Since then, he has been working on several research projects, one which is currently in the works deals with the West Virginia Mine Wars of 1912.