Congratulations to the Recipients of the 2026 Sam Fishman Travel Grant!

The Walter P. Reuther Library is proud to announce the recipients of the 2026 Sam Fishman Travel Grant.

These annual grants provide up to $1,000 to support travel to the Reuther Library to access archival records related to the American labor movement. The award is named in honor of Sam Fishman, a former UAW and Michigan AFL-CIO leader.

As part of their research visits, awardees are invited to discuss their research on Tales From the Reuther Library and/or another WSU outlet. Watch for updates about recipient visits later in the year.

Diego E. Avalos
Policing the Picket Line: State Power and Labor Control in the 1992 Drywall Workers’ Strike
California State University, Dominguez Hills

During the 1992 drywall workers’ strike in Southern California, striking workers became targets of coordinated police actions aimed at undermining collective organizing. Although the strike ultimately resulted in significant gains for workers, law enforcement agencies played a central role in facilitating strikebreaking by escorting replacement workers across picket lines, surveilling organizers, and participating in multi-agency task forces that disrupted labor mobilization. This project examines how policing practices function as mechanisms of labor control within late twentieth-century U.S. labor struggles, with particular attention to how local policing and immigration enforcement intersect to discipline a largely immigrant workforce.

Jasper Cattell
The World Without Work: The Politics of the Work/Environment Divide
Brown University

We take it for granted that when industry leaches a chemical into the air and water, the issue is an environmental health problem regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but when those same substances circulate in the workplace, it is a matter for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). But this was not always the case. Up until approximately 1970, federal jurisdiction for both areas was found in the Public Health Service, and it was only after substantial reorganization—spurred by the emergence of modern environmentalism—that the “environment” came to be defined as a distinct area of political concern. My dissertation project examines why this distinction emerged as a structuring logic of the American regulatory state, how it has shaped environmental and labor politics over the past six decades, and what its implications are today.

Alexandra J. Finley
She’s a Rebel: Women and the I.W.W.
University of Pittsburgh

My research examines the role of gender in organizing within the radical left in the early twentieth century. This history places gender at the center of the familiar story of the Industrial Workers of the World. While many labor leaders and unions at the time either resented the presence of women workers or ignored them, the I.W.W. went out of their way to draw women into the movement. Historians have paid limited attention to women in the union, focusing either on lead organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn or female factory workers. Most accounts of the I.W.W., however, emphasize its supposedly masculine rhetoric and migratory male members. I argue that organizing around female domestic-related work actually played a prominent role in I.W.W. ideology and allowed the organization to be one of the first to successfully organize many classes of service workers, from maids and laundry workers to waitresses. Manliness was certainly important to the I.W.W., but intimate histories of its rank-and-file female members and regional organizers provide an important counterpoint to previous conceptualizations of the organization.

Douglas H. Garrison
The United Brewery Workmen & The Origins of Industrial Unionism in America
Columbus State Community College

This project builds on an introductory survey of the German-American brewery workers organizing efforts in the late 19th century that was completed last year and presented at the Labor and Working Class Studies Association conference in Chicago. Both contemporaneous and secondary sources documenting those unionizing efforts note in passing the brewery workers’ commitment to industrial rather than craft unionism, which was unusual for both the mid-1880s and a largely ethnically-homogenous industry (lager brewing). My goal in traveling to the Reuther Library is to work through several primary source collections from the early 20th century to build a fuller and deeper picture of the linkages between brewery workers and industrial unionism as both organizing philosophy and strategy.

Edward Kihn & Laurie Robins
Black Lake
CUNY/UAW Region 9

We propose to visit the Reuther Library to conduct extensive research on the UAW’s Black Lake Family Education and Conference Center, the final and most substantial collaboration between longtime friends UAW President Walter Reuther and the architect Oscar Stonorov. This research will form the crux of our documentary film Black Lake–which considers the Center from both an architectural perspective–a rare example of socially-oriented modernism in the US – and a social one–a manifestation of pressures and tensions facing labor at the time.

Addy K. Malinowski
Have We Finally Got the News?: The Cultural Politics of The South End and Movements for Racial Justice in Detroit, 1968-2020
The Graduate Center, CUNY

Detroit in the last quarter century is a case study in concepts fundamental to American Studies: racial capitalism, the black radical tradition, and labor radicalism, to name a few. Early to mid-20th century capital accumulation—profits wrought by a multiracial labor force of Detroiters the world over—gave way to subsequent deaccumulation and accumulation by dispossession over the last quarter century. Despite this, a multitude of new social, cultural, and political formations that sought to create alternatives to racial capitalism arose in the City of Detroit. This project comparatively examines the intersection of cultural production and political movements in Detroit during the late 1960’s and early 2020’s. Political activity at the intersection of black radicalism and radical unionism in late ‘60’s Detroit is exemplified by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Drawing on Leninist theory, the League commandeered Wayne State University’s student newspaper, The South End. While the League’s political legacy has been well documented by scholar-activists, this project will look at The South End’s cultural pages. Utilizing the newspaper archives at the Reuther Library, this project analyzes poetry, art, and literature published alongside political reportage, seeking to understand how cultural documents both registered and existed alongside political turbulence as well as intersected with community life in the Cass Corridor.

Benjamin T. Prostine
Milked: Land, Labor, and Livestock in the Twentieth Century Dairy Industry
University of Georgia

My dissertation will be the first animal and labor history of dairy farming in the United States. Exploring how exploitation has not only impacted workers, small scale farmers, and the environment but also animals, this dissertation approaches cows as workers. Through archival research and oral histories, my dissertation will analyze topics like milk strikes, organic farming, artificial insemination, and the rise of large-scale dairy farming in California to offer a new history of dairy farming centered on human and nonhuman labor.

Ramya Swayamprakash
Designed to be a Dump: Zug Island and Environmental (In) Justice (1860-1970)
Grand Valley State University

This chapter advances the monograph’s broader intervention by revealing how Zug Island—one of Michigan’s most polluted sites—was intentionally engineered as a sacrificial landscape long before the language of environmental justice existed. Tracing the island’s formation from the desecration of Indigenous mounds through industrial expansion along the Rouge River including Ford’s Rouge Plant, the chapter shows how settler-colonial logics of extraction, vacancy, and sacrifice shaped both the physical landscape and the regulatory regimes that later ignored its harms. By situating Zug Island within this longer history, the chapter provides a critical framework for understanding why contemporary environmental justice concerns in Metro Detroit remain chronically unaddressed.