Dr. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf,

Teaching Fields:

Twentieth-century U.S., Cold War, U.S. business, economic and labor history, Hollywood and history

Contact:

Elizabeth Fones-Wolf
221F Woodburn Hall
P.O. Box 6303
Morgantown, WV 26506-6303
Phone: (304) 293-2421 ext. 5239
Fax: (304) 293-3616
Elizabeth.Fones-Wolf@mail.wvu.edu

• Degrees

  PhD, University of Massachusetts, 1990
  BA, MA, University of Maryland, 1976, 1979

• Research Interests

  My scholarship has focused on different aspects of twentieth century political, economic, and social history. A major theme of much of this work has been the struggle between organized labor and business to shape the ideas and images that constituted America’s political culture. My first book Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism (1994) examined the ways business’s political and economic ideology permeated American society from the shop floor to the classroom, to the church, and the political arena during the late forties and fifties. It offers an answer for one of the most important questions in recent American history: how did a majority of Americans come to give uncritical support for big business and the market while growing increasingly suspicious of organized labor and government? This project led to a second book, Waves of Opposition (2006), in which I explored in greater depth organized labor’s efforts to challenge corporate domination of the mass media, particularly radio. Through the Depression and World War II, unionists vigorously fought efforts to ensure that labor had access to broadcasting, and they joined a loose coalition of reformers which fought unchecked commercialism, promoted public service, and sought to make radio more representative and democratic.

  I have also continued to work on a long-term coauthored project exploring religion and class relations in modern America. This work began in the early eighties with an article on the Progressive Era in an path-breaking labor history collection, Working Class America (1983). I have come back to the topic in the ensuing years. Indeed, Selling Free Enterprise explored the interaction of the business community and Protestant churches following World War II. In 1998 and 1999, Ken Fones-Wolf and I published two articles (in Labor History and Church History) on the relationship between Protestantism and organized labor’s struggle for social justice. This last article won the 1999 Woodrow Wilson Award for best scholarly article in American Presbyterian/Reformed history. We are currently at work on several articles and two book projects examining the intersection of religion and labor.

• Grad Students Advised

  Ph.D.
  Tamara D. Bailey
  Michael J. Buseman [co-chair Lewis]
  Leonard M. Northington
  James H. Smith
  Michael A. Todt [co-chair Hodge]
  Brandon C. Williams

• Courses Offered

• Publications

  Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio, 1933-58, University of Illinois Press, 2006 (finalist for Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication James Tankard Book Award)

  “The Sacred in the Southern Organizing Drive: Protestant Activists in Operation Dixie,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas (forthcoming 2009)

  “Broadcasting Unionism: Labor and Community Radio in Postwar America” in
  Radio Cultures: Radio in American Life, ed. By Michael C. Keith, Peter
  Lange Publishing, 2008

  “Regulating Class Conflict on the Air: NBC’s Relationship With Organized Labor
  and Business,” (co-author) Michele Hilmes, ed., NBC: America’s Network, University of California Press, 2007

  “Defending Listeners’ Rights: Labour and Media Reform in Postwar America,”
  Canadian Journal of Communication 31 (2006): 499-518
  http://slate.wvu.edu/pages/7953/areas/drawer5;edit#
  “Cold-War Americanism: Business, Pageantry and Antiunionism in Weirton, West
  Virginia,” (coauthor) Business History Review 77 (Spring 2003): 61-91.