Nate Holdren is the author of Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. Injury Impoverished looks at the history of U.S. workplace injuries in the late-19th and early-20th Centuries. As the workers, employers, and reformers attempted to tackle the drastically high rates of workplace injuries and deaths, the nation passed a number of compensation laws that fundamentally changed how the law approached workplace injuries. Holdren, in examining this history illustrates the many shortcomings of these laws, and how laws meant to help employees were often used to do the exact opposite. At the heart of Holdren’s study is whether or not the economy and the legal system was interested in and able to do justice for a workers.
Dr. Holdren is an Assistant Professor at Drake University.
Derek Litvak is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland—College Park. His dissertation, "The Specter of Black Citizens: Race, Slavery, and Citizenship in the Early United States," examines how citizenship was used to both bolster the institution of slavery and exclude Black Americans from the body politic.
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