I study the relationship between labor, technology, and public policy in the twentieth-century United States. My dissertation examines how advocates of vocational education and technical training remade liberal approaches to automation, unemployment, poverty, welfare policy, and industrial relations in the years after World War II. Illuminating both the proliferation of “human capital” ideas and the policy formulations that they inspired, I show how business, labor, and civil rights groups offered competing interpretations of what “job training” should be, who it should serve, and how it should be administered.

High Skills, Low Wages: Job Training and the Politics of Human Capital in the Postwar United States

HIST 167Q: Labor Studies Internship and Research Seminar

HIST 74: Poverty, Inequality, and Social Justice in Global and Historical Perspective

HIST 9: Historical Methods and Skills