Department of Ethnic Studies

Timothy Messer-Kruse

Profile:

Timothy Messer-Kruse received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  In 1995 he joined the history department at the University of Toledo where he served as chair from 2003 to 2005 and was recognized with the university’s Outstanding Teaching Award in 2003.

While his area of specialization is in the field of U.S. Labor History, he has published on a diverse array of subjects including race relations, Gilded Age labor culture and radical social movements, the Chinese exclusion movement, the impact of changing technology on child labor, the campus culture of the Ku Klux Klan, the invention of corporate lobbying, class conflict in early auto racing, and the intersections of art and industrial design at the dawn of the twentieth century.  His first book, <i> The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Tradition, 1848-1876</i>. (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) unearthed previously unknown connections between the abolitionist, women’s rights, and socialist movements in America.  His detailed study of the largest Depression-era bank failure, <i>Banksters, Bosses and Smart Money: A Social History of the Great Toledo Bank Crash of 1931</i> (Ohio State University Press, 2005), appeared several years before history repeated itself in 2008. His study of race and culture in the 1980s, <i>Race Relations in the United States, 1980-2000 </i> (Greenwood Press, June 2008), was the final volume in a five-volume series of American ethnic history.

His most recent work uncovers new evidence and boldly revises long-held interpretations of the famed Haymarket Bombing in Chicago in 1886 and the anarchist movement behind it.  Out of this research he has written two books, <i>The Haymarket Trial: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age</i> (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and <i> The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks</i> (University of Illinois Press, 2012).  <i>The Haymarket Trial</i> was named the "Best Labor History Book of 2012" by the journal <i>Labor History</i> and awarded its annual book prize.  

Education:

Ph.D. in History, University of Wisconsin-Madison