Timothy Messer-Kruse

Chair, Ethnic Studies
Associate Professor, Ethnic Studies

Ph.D., History, University of Wisconsin
M.A., History, University of Wisconsin
B.A., History & South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin

Office: Shatzel Hall
Phone: 419-372-2796

E-mail: tmesser
Departmental Faculty Page

Selection of Recent Courses:

America, 1607 to 1865; America, 1865 to present; Main Themes in American History; American Radicalism from Tom Paine to Abbie Hoffman; American Labor and Working Class History; US Labor History; Race and Labor in American History; History of American Consumerism; Work in the Western World

Biography:

Timothy Messer-Kruse received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994. In 1995 he joined the history department at the University of Toledo where he served as chair from 2003 to 2006 and was recognized with the university’s outstanding teaching award in 2003. He is the author of The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848-1876 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), a book that documented for the first time how issues of race and sex were pivotal in the establishment of the direction and ideology of the American Left. Among Messser-Kruse’s many publications are his award-winning case study of the receptivity of American colleges to the Ku Klux Klan which was reprinted in Journal of Blacks in Higher Education; a sweeping indictment of the way labor historians have mishandled the history of union racism in Race Traitor; a history of how African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar was “discovered” and patronized by white elites; and the ways in which prevalent racial stereotypes of the Chinese molded labor economic thinking and divided the ranks of labor reformers in Labor History. Recently, Messer-Kruse has written articles detailing the hidden manner in which urban street markets were racially divided by Progresssive-era laws mandating increased regulation of weights and measures. Currently, he is completing an essay that explores what an 1808 child custody trial reveals about Americans’ beliefs about the physical nature of race in the early nineteenth century.

Selected Publications:

The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848-1876. (University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

"The Campus Klans of the University of Wisconsin: Tacit and Active Support for the Ku Klux Klan in a Culture of Intolerance," Wisconsin Magazine of History, 77, (Autumn 1993), 2-38. Reprinted in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 23, (Spring 1999), 83-93.

“From Crusaders to Bystanders?: Recent Reinterpretations of Labor’s Role in the Chinese Exclusion Movement,” Race Traitor #15 (Fall 2001), pp. 91-124.

“Eight Hours, Greenbacks and ‘Chinamen’”, Labor History, 42:2 (May 2001), 133-158.

“How Toledo Discovered Paul L. Dunbar,” on-line article published on the Toledo’s Attic Virtual Musuem, 2000.

“Racializing the Marketplace: Unpacking the Rhetoric of “Honest Weight” in Progressive-Era America,” submitted to the Journal of American Ethnic History [refereed].

“The Chinese Question,” "The First International in America," “The Greenback Labor Party,” Encyclopedia of the American Left, Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, Dan Georgakas, eds., second edition, (Oxford University Press, 1998).