CANR
WORK TITLE: What Can We Learn from the Great Depression?
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LAST VOLUME: CA 280
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Los Altos, CA.
EDUCATION:University of California, Santa Cruz, B.A., 1978; Yale University, M.A., 1982, M.Phil., 1984, Ph.D., 1988.
ADDRESS
CAREER
State University of New York at Binghamton, visiting lecturer, 1987-88; University of Missouri, St. Louis, assistant professor of history, 1988-91; University of California at Santa Cruz, American studies and history departments, professor, 1991—2018; research professor and professor of history emerita, 2018—. Member of U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project, 2000—14. Founder and director, Center for Labor Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2007—2010.
MEMBER:American Federation of Teachers.
WRITINGS
Contributor to the book Work Engendered: Toward a New Labor History, edited by Ava Baron, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1991. Contributor to journals, including Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Politics and Society, Amerasia Journal, International Labor and Working-Class History, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Nation, Washington Post, In These Times, and New Labor Forum. Contributor to numerous periodicals and magazines, including New York Times, Washington Post, and Foreign Affairs.
SIDELIGHTS
Dana Frank is a California-based writer and educator with an intense interest in labor solidarity. She earned her doctoral degree at Yale University, then in 1991 joined the faculty of the University of California at Santa Cruz as a professor of American studies and history. Her primary area of research and academic interest focuses on the United States and Latin America and includes the social and cultural history of the United States, labor history, gender studies, the modern-day political economy, and Central America. Beyond her academic endeavors, she is also a member of the U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (US/LEAP), and has worked with them since 2000 to help support banana unions in Latin American countries. She is a regular contributor to various periodicals and journals including the Nation, Washington Post, In These Times, and New Labor Forum. Frank has also written a number of books on social and economic details pertaining to the labor cause, including Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929, Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century, which she wrote with Howard Zinn and Robin D.G. Kelley, and Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America. Her book Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California’s Kitsch Monuments involves her own travels around California.
In Purchasing Power, Frank looks at the labor issues in Seattle in the wake of World War I, focusing in particular on how class conflict was linked to production and how the use of consumer tactics, such as boycotts, union labels, and cooperative, affected production in the area. The role of both race and gender, as always, is a significant portion of Frank’s discussion about the situation. At the start of the period she addresses, the idea of a unionized labor force was not so far-fetched, given that the industry that sprang up in the region during the early 1920s would have made unions attractive to the workers, particularly in the shipbuilding industry and the metal workers, as well as with others in which physical labor was an accepted part of the job. Prior to this, industries were smaller and most unions were AFL craft unions, but the idea of the union was already in place. The General Strike of 1919 served to kick a more radical version of the concept into high gear. Colin Davis, reviewing for the H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, commented that “Frank does not confine her attention to the respective contradictions, the author also looks beyond the boundaries of traditional labor history. Employer action in countering labor’s tactics are discussed, as is the red scare in diluting any semblance of oppositional movement culture.” Alex Keyssar, in a review for the Nation, opined that “Frank may be jeopardizing her own vision of history’s value for contemporary politics by falsely dichotomizing determinist and non-determinist versions of history. One need not think that employers or states are omnipotent to recognize that, under some conditions, they will win and win easily.”
Buy American explores what this simple phrase means in the twentieth century, at a time when it is often difficult to determine what is truly an American product, and when many items are simply not available if one is expecting to find a version manufactured on home soil. Many American-owned companies no longer manufacture their products in the United States. Likewise, in a twisted sort of reversal, a number of companies manufacturing within the U.S. are actually headquartered in some other location. There is also the question of quality, working conditions, and a host of other factors that one needs to consider when deciding to make a purchase if the conditions of its production are a real concern. Frank provides a history of the idea of buying American, which dates back as far as the days of Paul Revere and the colonists’ refusal to put up with the tea monopoly enjoyed by the East India Company. She then goes on to show how modern-day manufacturing has changed, even in the last few years. John Cavanaugh, in a review for the Nation, concluded that “in this new century, millions of Americans striving to support community and to express solidarity with US workers will Buy American. These are noble and positive sentiments. Yet, as Frank reminds us, they are most likely to promote dignified work if they are connected to the expanding efforts to rein in global corporations and promote workers’ and other human rights in all corners of the earth.”
Bananeras looks at the banana unions in Latin America and the ways in which the recent influx of women has begun to alter the structure and the organization of these groups. Frank looks at the entire banana-producing region, which extends from Guatemala to Ecuador, but pays particular attention to Honduras, which is a top producing nation and also a strong example of the trend that she reports on over the course of her book. For a long time, women found it extremely difficult to break into the banana workers’ unions, and in order to better understand why, she addresses the gender roles as a whole throughout the region, examining how women were traditionally treated and how the discrepancies between the old image of the woman’s role and the new role that women were striving for caused at least a mental roadblock to their advancement, if not a physical one. She then addresses the role of women in the banana industry, discussing how they faced not only the traditional challenges for anyone in that business trying to participate in a union, but their own unique set of issues based on their gender. While the companies are intent on eliminating the unions entirely, regardless of the gender of the employee participating, female employees must also face various issues such as lack of maternity leave—they often get fired when they become pregnant—sexual harassment, and a lack of voice in the decision-making within the unions. Erik Loomis, in a review for the Alterdestiny Blog, remarked of Frank’s effort: “ Bananeras is a well-written and thoughtful book on the role of women in the recent labor history of Latin America. Most importantly, it’s a great example of the kind of useful history and writing that a smart scholar can do.”
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Frank’s next book also focused on the situation in Honduras but with an emphasis on the situation since a coup occurred in June 2009. The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup analyzes how the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya was deposed by the military and police and how the military regime that followed was supported by the United States. She also chronicles, however, the resistance movement that quickly arose. It was made up of church leaders, educators, and trade unions, along with many other regular Hondurans. That movement has also received support from people in the United States, but the conflict and unrest in the country has led to a dramatic outflow of people looking to reach the United States. Frank discusses how U.S. foreign policy and immigration policy have contradicted each other.
Peter Whittaker, writing in the New Internationalist, praised Frank for how she persists in defending the Honduran people as well as the “brave and thankless task of speaking . . . truth to power.” In ForeWord, Rachel Jagareski wrote that Frank’s book is “powerful, passionate, and meticulous in its documentation of foreign policy in Honduras.” Jagareski described the book as “harrowing” in the testimonials it presents and its “indictment of Honduran police, security guards, and soldiers controlled by oligarchs and transnational corporations,” but she also lauded Frank for how she “brings immediacy and humanity to this continuing tragedy.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews called the book “important” and “gripping.” They wrote that Frank “offers a heady mix of personal experience, historical context, and contemporary condemnation.”
What Can We Learn from the Great Depression?: Stories of Ordinary People & Collective Action in Hard Times showcases Frank’s ability to use the stories of ordinary people to offer a larger perspective. The book looks at the United States during the Great Depression and especially how ordinary people worked together collectively to make their society a better place. Examples include seven Black women who staged a sit-down strike to demand better pay and an end to racial discrimination, Mexican American workers who were forced to return to Mexico, and numerous others who formed cooperatives, who protested evictions, or who demanded government relief. Frank does not just cover the progressive causes, however. She also covers the Black Legion, a white supremacist organization that advocated for racism, antisemitism, and anti-Catholicism. “A well-crafted work of social history that highlights little-known aspects of pre-World War II America” is how a writer in Kirkus Reviews described the book. They praised it as a “sweeping history.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Historical Review, April 1, 2001, Michael Goldfield, review of Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism, p. 558.
American Prospect, January 1, 2002, Cowie Jefferson, review of Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century, p. 41.
American Studies, March 22, 1997, Peter Rachleff, review of Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919- 1929, p. 160.
Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law, December 22, 2002, review of Three Strikes, p. 453.
Booklist, June 1, 1999, Vanessa Bush, review of Buy American, p. 1760.
Business History Review, March 22, 2001, Elizabeth McKillen, review of Buy American, p. 186.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, December 1, 1999, D. Lindstrom, review of Buy American, p. 767.
Chronicle of Higher Education, August 6, 1999, review of Buy American, p. 24; August 10, 2001, “Labor History of 20th Century May Be Headed for Silver Screen; Nuclear Physicists Retract Paper Claiming Creation of Element 118”; April 28, 2006, “Harvest Is Power for Women in Banana-Worker Unions”; April 28, 2006, “Verbatim,” p. 20.
Contemporary Sociology, January 1, 1996, Robert V. Robinson, review of Purchasing Power, p. 52.
Finance & Development, June 1, 2000, Vivek B. Arora, review of Buy American, p. 55.
ForeWord, October 27, 2018, Rachel Jagareski, review of The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup.
Industrial Relations Journal, June 1, 1995, Sonia Liff, review of Purchasing Power, p. 168.
International Review of Social History, August 1, 2007, review of Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America, p. 329.
Journal of American History, June 1, 1995, Lynn Y. Weiner, review of Purchasing Power, p. 307; June 1, 2000, Jefferson Cowie, review of Buy American, p. 193.
Journal of Consumer Affairs, December 22, 1995, review of Purchasing Power, p. 477.
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, September 22, 1996, review of Purchasing Power, p. 353.
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2018, review of The Long Honduran Night; November 1, 2024, review of What Can We Learn from the Depression?: Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times.
Labor History, January 1, 1995, Jacqueline K. Dirks, review of Purchasing Power, p. 121; November 1, 2002, Lawrence B. Glickman, review of Three Strikes, p. 565; February 1, 2003, Robert P. Wolensky, review of Buy American, p. 118.
Labour/Le Travail, September 22, 2007, Susan Spronk, review of Bananeras, p. 313.
Library Journal, June 1, 1999, Donna L. Schulman, review of Buy American, p. 140.
NACLA Report on the Americas, March 1, 2006, Diana Medina, review of Bananeras.
Nation, August 8, 1994, Alex Keyssar, review of Purchasing Power, p. 171; October 25, 1999, “Is the Boston Tea Party Over?,” p. 33.
New Internationalist, March-April, 2019, Peter Whittaker, review of The Long Honduran Night, p. 77.
Pacific Historical Review, August 1, 1995, Chris Friday, review of Purchasing Power, p. 459; November 1, 2001, Daniel Pope, review of Buy American, p. 641.
Publishers Weekly, June 21, 1999, review of Buy American, p. 50; July 16, 2001, review of Three Strikes, p. 173.
Reference & Research Book News, February 1, 2006, review of Bananeras; February 1, 2008, review of Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California’s Kitsch Monuments.
Reviews in American History, December 1, 1994, Lawrence Glickman, review of Purchasing Power, p. 632.
Western Historical Quarterly, March 22, 1995, Michael Honey, review of Purchasing Power, p. 92.
WorkingUSA, March 1, 2000, Brendan Smith, review of Buy American; March 22, 2002, Steve Early, review of Three Strikes, p. 157.
ONLINE
Alterdestiny Blog, http://alterdestiny.blogspot.com/ (August 31, 2006), Erik Loomis, review of Bananeras.
City Lights Web site, http://www.citylights.com/ (September 30, 2008), author profile.
Dana Frank website, https://danafrank.sites.ucsc.edu/ (March 21, 2025).
H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, http://www.h-net.org/ (October 6, 1995), Colin Davis, review of Purchasing Power.
South End Press Web site, http://www.southendpress.org/ (September 30, 2008), author profile.
University of California Santa Cruz History Department website, http://history.ucsc.edu/ (September 30, 2008), faculty profile.
Dana Frank is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America from Haymarket Books. Since the 2009 military coup her articles about human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras have appeared in The Nation, New York Times, Politico Magazine, Foreign Affairs.com, The Baffler, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and many other publications, and she has testified in both the US Congress and Canadian Parliament.
Dana Frank
Historian, Professor, Writer
I am Research Professor and Professor Emerita of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a longtime historian of labor, women, and social movements in the US and beyond, always paying close attention to race and ethnicity. For many years I have also worked on human rights and US policy in Honduras, about which I have written and spoken widely in the popular media and have testified in the US Congress. In all my work, I pursue in-depth scholarly research and then write about it in forms accessible to popular audiences, in service to social justice achieved from below by working people. I also experiment with creative nonfiction.
My current book, What Can We Learn From the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times, out from Beacon Press in 2024, explores the ways in which ordinary working people, in the face of economic crisis and ferocious racism, turned to collective action from below during the Great Depression. With both inspiring and sobering stories, the book is designed to speak directly to working people’s challenges today while offering a nuanced understanding of the race and gender politics of what each group did and didn’t get from the New Deal.
I am the author of seven books, including Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism; The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup; and, with Robin D.G. Kelly and Howard Zinn, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century. My work has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, Labor Notes, The Nation, The Baffler, The Jacobin, NACLA, New Left Review, The Progressive, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Politico Magazine, Literary Hub, Hammer and Hope Magazine, and elsewhere, as well as in scholarly publications. I have been interviewed widely by TV, radio, and print media, including regularly on Democracy Now!
DANA FRANK
October 1, 2024
History Department
Humanities Academic Services
University of California, Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
Email: danafrank@ucsc.edu
EDUCATION:
Ph.D. Yale University, American Studies, 1988
M.Phil. Yale University, American Studies, 1984
M.A. Yale University, American Studies, 1982
B.A. University of California, Santa Cruz, 1978
EMPLOYMENT:
University of California, Santa Cruz
Research Professor and Professor of History Emerita, 2018-
Professor of History, 2002-2018
Professor of American Studies, 1999-2002
Associate Professor of American Studies, 1994-99
Assistant Professor of American Studies, 1991-94
University of Missouri, St. Louis, Assistant Professor of History, 1988-91
State University of New York at Binghamton, Visiting Lecturer in History, 1987-88
PUBLICATIONS:
Books:
What Can We Learn From the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times, Beacon Press, 2024
La larga noche hondureña: Violencia, resistencia, y EEUU tras el golpe de Estado. Spanish edition of The Long Honduran Night, with a new epilogue. Translated by Janeth Blanco. Editorial Guaymuras, Honduras, 2022
The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup, Haymarket Books, 2018
Women Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big: The 1937 Detroit Woolworth’s Strike, reprint of essay in Three Strikes, with a new interview with the author and introduction by Todd Chretien, Haymarket Books, 2012
Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California’s Kitsch Monuments, City Lights Books, 2007
El poder de las mujeres es poder sindical: La transformación de los sindicatos bananeros de America Latina, Spanish Edition of Bananeras, translated by Janeth Blanco, Editorial Guaymuras, Honduras, 2006
Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America, South End Press, 2005; reissued, Haymarket Books, 2016)
Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century, with Howard Zinn and Robin D.G. Kelley, Beacon Press, 2001
Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism, Beacon Press, 1999
Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929, Cambridge University Press, 1994
Articles in Popular Media, Public Policy Journals, and Literary Magazines:
“Ohio’s Little-Known Fascist Member of Congress: How a local prosecutor protected white supremacists and went on to a career in Washington, DC.” History News Network, November 4, 2024.
“You Know About the KKK, but What the Black Legion?” The Jacobin, October 18, 2024.
Reprinted in Portuguese in Jacobin Brasil, “Voce conhece a KKK, mas e a Black Legion?“
“Trump Says He’ll Expel a Million Immigrants. Believe Him–It Happened Before,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2024.
“No Money, No Milk: Wet Nurses Made a Show of Militance in 1937,” Hammer & Hope Magazine, No. 4 (Summer 2024)
“UC Graduate Workers and the History of Political Strikes,” LAWCHA Online, May 30, 2024.
“Wildfires Rage, Covid Spreads: In California, Life As We Knew It Has Disappeared,” The Guardian, September 3, 2020.
“Honduran Dreams,” New Left Review Sidecar, December 14, 2021.
“After Backing Coups and Corruption, the US Now Has a Chance to Do the Right Thing in Honduras,” Washington Post, December 1, 2021.
“Oh, Mary, Don’t You Weep,” Memory Series, Humanities Institute, University of California, Santa Cruz, April 21, 2021.
“Biden Must End U.S. Policy Shoring Up the Corrupt and Authoritarian Regime in Honduras,” Washington Post, March 3, 2021.
“In Rebuilding Big Basin, Which History Do We Want to Remember?,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 30, 2020.
“Wildfires Rage, Covid Spreads: In California, Life As We Knew It Has Disappeared,” The Guardian, September 3, 2020.
“Congresswomen of Color Have Always Fought Back Against Sexism,” Washington Post, July 29, 2020.
“Honduras: `We’re Supporting the Axe Murderers,’” (excerpted from The Long Honduran Night), The Jacobin, November 24, 2018.
“Telephone Not Intervened,” Catamaran Literary Reader, Vol. 6, Issue 1 (Winter 2018).
“Our History Shows There’s a Dark Side to `Buy American,’” Washington Post, January 29, 2017; reprinted in New Haven Register, Albuquerque Journal.
“The US Union Label: The Allure of Consumer Solidarity, and a Minefield of Challenges,” International Union Rights, Vol. 23, No. 4 (December 2016), p. 8.
“End U.S. Support for the Thugs of Honduras,” New York Times, September 22, 2016.
“Protests Light Up Long Honduran Night,” Miami Herald, July 16, 2015.
“US Underwrites Corruption and Violence in Honduras,” Al Jazeera America, June 1, 2015.
“Term Limits Ruling is Another Nail in the Coffin of Honduran Democracy,” World Politics Review, May 7, 2015.
“Just Like Old Times in Central America: Why the U.S. Needs to Stop Funneling Money to Honduras and Treat its President Like the Corrupt Ruler He Really Is,” Foreign Policy.com, March 15, 2015.
“The Long Judicial Arm of the Honduran Coup,” Huffington Post, February 4, 2015.
“Frank: US Should Rethink Support for Honduras,” Houston Chronicle, January 2, 2015.
“Who’s Responsible for the Flight of Honduran Children?” Huffington Post, July 9, 2014.
“Honduras: The Thugocracy Next Door,” Politco Magazine, February 28, 2014.
“Hernández’s Election Was Built on Corruption,” Houston Chronicle, January 26, 2014.
“Hopeless in Honduras?,” Foreign Affairs.com, November 22, 2013.
“Honduras Votes,” The Nation, November 25, 2013, online as “A High-Stakes Election in Honduras,” The Nation.com, November 6, 2013.
“In Honduras, Military Takes Over, with U.S. Blessing,” Miami Herald, September 11, 2013. Reprinted in Spanish in El Tiempo, San Pedro Sula, Honduras, September 20, 2013. Reposted on Portside.com, Zcommunications.com, and multiple websites.
“Vocabulary Lessons,” The Baffler, No. 23, August 2013 (posted online June 28, 2013).
“Reverse Course,” (online as “The Latin America Mistake”), Los Angeles Times, February 12, 2013, translated and reposted worldwide.
“Honduras Gone Wrong,” Foreign Affairs.com, October 16, 2012; translated and reposted in Spanish, German, Greek, Icelandic, Swedish, and multiple other languages and sites worldwide.
“How Low Can Honduras Go?” The Nation.com, October 15, 2012.
“U.S. Has Blinders on in Honduras,” Los Angeles Times, August 24, 2012. Translated and reposted in Honduras, Spain, and elsewhere.
“Honduras: Which Side Are We On?” The Nation (cover story), June 11, 2012, and TheNation.com, March 21, 2012; reposted at Longreads.com; translated into Spanish and Portuguese, and widely reposted in Honduras and worldwide.
“Dems Divided over Honduras,” The Nation, April 19, 2012; and TheNation.com, March 28, 2012
“Honduras in Flames,” TheNation.com, CommonDreams.org, Voselsoberano.com and reposted worldwide, February 16, 2012.
“A Mess in Honduras, Made in the U.S.,” New York Times, January 27, 2012; simultaneously in the International Herald Tribune ; reprinted in El Tiempo (Tegucigalpa, Honduras), January 28, translated into German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, distributed worldwide.
“David Montgomery, Grand Master Workman,” TheNation.com, December 19, 2011.
“Wikileaks Honduras: U.S. Linked to Brutal Businessman,” TheNation.com, October 21,2011; reposted at CommonDreams.org, in Spanish translation at Voselsoberano.com, and reposted worldwide.
“Zelaya Returns to Honduras, But Justice is Still Not Done,” TheNation.com, June 2, 2011, and widely reposted.
“Ousted President’s Return Doesn’t Mean Repression is Over in Honduras,” TheProgressive.org, Newsday.com, and widely reposted by McClatchy News Service and AP, May 27, 2011.
“Open Season on Teachers in Honduras,” TheNation.com, May 5, 2011; in Spanish, “Honduras: La Temporada de los Docentes Gaseados,” at voselsoberano.com, (Honduras) May 5, 2011. Reposted widely.
“US: Wrong on Honduras,” The Nation, January 31, 2011; TheNation.com, January 13, 2011; in Spanish at voselsoberano.com (Honduras), and reposted widely on web sites in English and Spanish.
“In Honduras, the Holiday Season Brings Repression,” CommonDreams.org, January 11, and reposted widely.
“Repression’s Reward in Honduras? Dinner with Obama,” The Huffington Post, CommonDreams.org, CounterPunch.org, September 24, 2010, and multiple repostings, including Spanish translation at voselsoberano.com (Honduras), September 25, 2010.
“Honduras Resists,” in “Noted,” The Nation, July 19-26, 2010, p. 5.
“Crisis of Legitimacy in Honduras?” TheNation.com, NPR.com, and multiple repostings, June 30, 2010.
“A Year Later, Obama Still Shores Up Honduran Coup,” Lexington Herald-Leader (KY), Connecticut Post, TheProgressive.com, McClatchy-Tribune News Service, and multiple repostings, June 28, 2010
“Hondurans’ Great Awakening,” The Nation, April 5, 2010; also posted at TheNation.com, March 18, 2010, and reprinted on multiple websites.
“No Free Election in Honduras under Military Occupation,” HuffingtonPost.com (featured), November 26, 2009; CommonDreams.org, November 27, 2009, reprinted worldwide, including WSJ.com, Atlantic.wire.
“Obama Shouldn’t Cave In To The Far Right On Honduras,” syndicated nationally by Progressive Media Project/ McClatchy-Tribune News Service, including ChicagoTribune.com, LATimes.com, Cleveland Plain Dealer , TV stations and websites nationally, October 28, 2009 and subsequent reprints.
“Honduran Coup Has Been Far From Bloodless,” San José Mercury News, September 4, 2009
“Honduras: Are We Going to Make Concessions to Those Who Perpetrate Coups?” New America Media. com, posted to multiple web sites worldwide in Spanish and English, July 17, 2009
“President Obama’s Honduran Test,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 1, 2009
“Once They Started, Sit-Downs Spread Like Wildfire,” Labor Notes #364, July 2009, pp. 5, 14.
“UC Service Workers Deserve Livable Wages,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 17, 2008
“Our Fruit, Their Labor, and Global Reality,” Washington Post, Sunday Outlook section, June 2, 2002
“From Woolworth’s to the WTO,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 2, 2001
“I Mille Volti Di Una Lunga Marcia,” Il Manifesto (Rome, Italy), January 2, 2000 (translated into Italian by Marina Impallomeni); reprinted in English in AFT Perspectives as “The Revolution in Seattle?” March/April 2000
“The Free Trade-Off,” San Jose Mercury News, Sept. 5, 1999
“Is This a Cause We Should Rally Around? Not Exactly,” Washington Post Outlook Section, July 4, 1999. Reprinted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 18, 1999; Las Vegas Journal-Review, July 11, 1999; Flint Journal, July 18, 1999; Louisville Courier, July 11, 1999
Articles in Scholarly Publications:
“Bananas, Elephants, and a Coup: Learning International Solidarity the Hard Way,” in Richard Greenwald and Daniel Katz, Labor Rising: The Past and Future of Working People in America, The New Press, 2012
“Women’s Power is Union Power: Banana Worker Unions in Latin America,” New Labor Forum, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Summer 2005), pp. 85-94
“Where Is the History of U.S. Labor and International Solidarity? Part I: A Moveable Feast,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Vol. I, No. 1 (March 2004), pp. 95-119
“Where Are the Workers in Consumer-Worker Alliances? Class Dynamics and the History of Consumer-Labor Campaigns,” Politics and Society, Vol. 31, No. 3 (September 2003), pp. 363-379.
“Demons in the Parking Lot: Auto Workers and the `Japanese Threat’ in the 1980s,” Amerasia Journal, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2002), pp. 33-50
“White Working-Class Women and the Race Question,” International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 54 (Fall 1998), pp. 80-102
Coordinator and Contributor, Symposium on Tera Hunter, To `Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, including essay, “The Labor Historian’s New Clothes,” and contributions from Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Sharon Harley, Lawrence Levine, David Roediger and Tera Hunter, in Labor History, Vol. 39,No. 2 (May 1998), pp. 169-87.
“Class,” “Consumption and Consumerism,” “Work,” and “Working-Class Feminism,” in The Readers’ Companion to U.S. Women’s History, ed. Wilma Mankiller, Gwendolyn Mink, Marysa Navarro, Barbara Smith and Gloria Steinem (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), pp. 107-09, 132-34, 220-221, 653-54.
“Irving Bernstein’s Lean Years,” Labor History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Winter 1995-96), pp. 83-89.
“A Class About Race,” Socialist Review, No. 94 (Vol. 24, No. 1-2), Winter 1995, pp. 243-50
“Race Relations and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1915-1929,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Winter 1994/95), pp. 35-44
“Which `Women’ and the Labor Movement? Women’s Roles in the Seattle, Washington, AFL, 1917-1929,” in Gabriella Hauch, ed., Geschlecht–Klasse–Ethnizitat (Vienna, Austria: Europaverlag, 1993), pp. l89-97
“`Food Wins All Struggles:’ Seattle Labor and the Politicization of Consumption, 1919-1929,” Radical History Review No. 51 (September, 1991), pp. 65-89
“Gender, Consumer Organizing, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929,” in Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward A New Labor History (Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 273-95
“Housewives, Socialists, and the Politics of Food: The 1917 New York Cost-of-Living Protests,” Feminist Studies Vol. 11 No. 2 (Summer 1985), 355-385, reprinted in Kathryn Kish Sklar and Tom Dublin, Eds., Women and Power in American History: A Reader Vol. II, From 1870 (Prentice-Hall, 1991)
“Food Protests,” in Paul Buhle, Mari Jo Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left (Garland Press, 1990 and 1999)
Review Article and Exchange, “Labor’s Decline,” Monthly Review, Vol .41, No. 5 (October 1989), pp. 28-55; Vol. 41, No. 11 (April 1990), pp. 41-42
Review Essay, “The Traffic in Subservience: Public-Contact Service Workers,” Monthly Review, Vol. 39 No. 2 (June 1987), pp. 55-62
“Out of the Past, a New Honduras Culture of Resistance,” NACLA, May 4, 2010.
Interviews:
“Northern Aggression,” interview by Andrew Cockburn, Harper’s Magazine, December 26, 2018.
“The Election is Being Stolen,” interview by Parker Asmann, Jacobin, December 8, 2017.
“The Pitfalls of `Buy American,’” interview by Chris Brooks, Labor Notes, May 11, 2017, reposted/reprinted by the New York Times, Jacobin, Truthout, In These Times.
“The Fate of Honduras,” interview by Parker Asmann, Jacobin, December 7, 2016.
“Eye on Honduras,” interview by Veruska Cantelli, Warscapes, December 9, 2012; reprinted in Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War, ed. Bhakti Shringarpure and Veruska Cantell (New Delhi: Zubcan Publishers, 2023), pp. 329-34.
HONORS AND AWARDS:
Grants and Fellowships:
Dickson Emeriti Professor Award, 2021-22, University of California, Santa Cruz
Appleton Foundation Grants, for Spanish translation and publication of The Long Honduran Night, 2019, 2021
University of California President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities, 2011-12
Special Research Grant, University of California, Santa Cruz Academic Senate, 2015-16, 2011-12, 2004-05
National Endowment for the Humanities:
Fellowship for University Teachers, 2011-12
Summer Stipend, 2002
Fellowship for College Teachers, 1996-97
Summer Stipend, 1994
Travel to Collections Grant, 1993
Fellowship for College Teachers, 1990-91
Faculty Research Fellowship, Institute for Humanities Research, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2010-11
University of California, Santa Cruz Mexus Small Grant, University of California, 2010
Travel Grant, New York University Center for the U.S. and the Cold War, 2009
Diversity Fund Grant, Office of the Provost, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2009
Labor Studies Grant, Miguel Contreras Labor Studies Fund, University of California, 2008-09 ($90,000, for the Center for Labor Studies)
Faculty Research Grant, University of California Labor and Employment Research Fund, 2008-09 ($30,000)
Labor Studies Grant, Miguel Contreras Labor Studies Fund, University of California, 2007-08 ($85,000, for the Center for Labor Studies)
Faculty Research Grant, University of California Labor and Employment Research Fund 2007-08 ($20,000)
Institute for Humanities Research, Humanities Research Fellowship, University of California, Santa Cruz, Spring 2004
Faculty Research Grant, University of California Institute for Labor and Employment, 2002-03
Travel Grant, Institute for Humanities Research, University of California Santa Cruz, 2000, 2002
Academic Senate Research Grants, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1991-2022
Humanities Division Research Grant, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1991-1992
Weldon Springs Grant, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 1989
Summer Research Grant, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 1989
Albert Beveridge Grant, American Historical Association, 1986
John D. Rockefeller 3rd Fellowship, Program on Non-Profit Organizations, Yale University, 1986
Henry Kaiser Family Grant, Walter Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, 1986
Woodrow Wilson Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies, 1984
Yale University Prize Teaching Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching, 1983-84
Yale University Graduate Fellowship, 1980-84
Danforth Graduate Fellowship, 1980-84
Honors and Prizes:
Shortlisted, Juan E. Mendez Award for Human Rights in Latin America, Duke University, for The Long Honduran Night, 2019.
Finalist, Foreword Magazine INDIE Award, for The Long Honduran Night, 2019.
Founders’ Award, Reel Work May Day Labor Film Festival, Santa Cruz, California, May, 2008
Association of American University Presses, University Press Books Selected for Public and Secondary School Libraries, and selection, “The Best of the Best from the University Presses,” C-SPAN Book TV, July 14, 2002 (for Three Strikes )
Wayne Morse Chair of Law and Politics, University of Oregon, Spring Quarter, 2001
Excellence in Teaching Prize, Academic Senate Committee on Teaching, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2001
Book of the Year Award, International Labor History Association (for Buy American ), 1999
W. Turrentine Jackson Prize for best first book, Western History Association, (for Purchasing Power), 1996
George Washington Eggleston Prize for Best Dissertation in U.S. History, Yale University, 1988
SERVICE: (selected)
Moderator and Organizer, briefing, “Corruption, Impunity and Human Rights in Honduras,” United States Congress, House of Representatives, October 20, 2015.
Public Testimony, California State Assembly, on immigration of undocumented, unaccompanied minors from Central America, August 19, 2014.
Public Testimony, Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, United States Congress House of Representatives, on human rights in Honduras, July 25, 2013.
Public Testimony, Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, House of Commons, Parliament of Canada, May 9, 2013, on human rights in Honduras.
Invited Testimony (declined) Tom Lantos Commission on Human Rights, United States Congress House of Representatives, July 2012, on media freedom in Honduras.
Advising on U.S. policy in Honduras, Members of U.S. Congress, 2009-present.
Founder and Director, Center for Labor Studies, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz, 2007- 2010.
Graduate Program Director, History Department, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz, 2004-07.
Member, Board of Directors, U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (USLEAP), Chicago, Illinois, 2010-14.
Consultant (volunteer), U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (USLEAP) and Coordinadora de Sindicatos Bananeros de Latinoamerica (COLSIBA) [Coalition of Latin American Banana Unions], 2000-14.
MEDIA INTERVIEWS: (selected)
Television: BBC World Service, Democracy Now! (regularly), Thom Hartmann Show, Al Jazeera English TV, Fusion TV (ABC/Univision) TeleSURTV, TV Globo, UNETV, (Tegucigalpa, Honduras), Free Speech TV, Community TV Santa Cruz. Background interviews with ABC News, CBS News.
Radio and Podcasts: National Public Radio (All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Latino USA, Marketplace), Free Speech Radio News, Pacifica Radio, French Radio International, Voice of America, multiple additional radio stations in Honduras, the U.S, and Canada; Kitchen Sisters podcast; Bloomberg News podcast.
Print and Online Media: New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, Bloomberg News, Toronto Star, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Associated Press, Houston Chronicle, San José Mercury-News, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Business Week, VICE, BuzzFeed, CNN.com, Reuters, McClatchy News Service, NBC.com, NBC Latino, Latin Pulse!, Univision, Tokyo Shimbun, De Vokskrant (Netherlands) French Radio International, EFE (Spain).
The Long Honduran Night
by Dana Frank
(Haymarket Books, ISBN 9781608469604)
haymarketbooks.org
***
In June 2009 the democratically elected President of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was deposed in a coup and bundled out of the country. What followed--looting of public assets, repression of civic organizations, rigged elections, police and army brutality, and state-sponsored death squads--was straight out of the military-coup playbook. Less expected, given the Honduran history of quiescence under military rule, was the immediate and sustained popular resistance movement that sprang up. Organized under the banner of the National Front of Popular Resistance, it encompassed trade unions, campesinos, church leaders and educators, pushing back in the face of state terror.
Dana Frank, a North American academic and long-time campaigner for the rights of the Honduran people, has told the story of the last decade of repression and resistance in two strands. First, based on numerous visits to the country, she recounts in exhaustive detail the development of the struggle within Honduras, from broad national alliances to local campaigns and courageous individuals. Second, in a more autobiographical vein, she details the solidarity movement she helped to set up within the United States and its lobbying activities designed to highlight the plight of the Honduran people. As Frank shows, the Obama administration's support for the coup perpetrators prepared the ground for Trump's xenophobic 'build the wall' rhetoric. The recent Honduran migrant caravan consisted of people fleeing the calamity the US helped to create. The world desperately needs bridges not walls and it is greatly to the credit of Frank and those like her that they persist in their brave and thankless task of speaking this vital truth to power. PW
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 New Internationalist
http://www.newint.org
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Whittaker, Peter. "The Long Honduran Night." New Internationalist, no. 518, Mar.-Apr. 2019, p. 77. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A575197074/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=29d19f92. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.
Dana Frank; THE LONG HONDURAN NIGHT; Haymarket Books (Nonfiction: History) 17.95 ISBN: 9781608469604
Byline: Rachel Jagareski
Dana Frank's intensely personal The Long Honduran Night chronicles efforts to redirect America's foreign policy toward Honduras following its 2009 military coup. After witnessing increasingly violent repression, Frank became an activist, documenting human rights abuses, mobilizing public support, and meeting with political leaders to slow the spigot of American and international aid flowing to the post-coup regime.
The book is harrowing, filled with first- and second-hand accounts of murders, gang rapes, disappearances, and attacks on Honduran civilians. It is a meticulous indictment of Honduran police, security guards, and soldiers controlled by oligarchs and transnational corporations. While the drumbeat of these atrocities can be mind-numbing, Frank brings immediacy and humanity to this continuing tragedy with her accounts of individuals: farmers, teenagers, teachers, and LGBTQ and indigenous activists who have been brutalized.
An especially illuminating passage highlights the obstacles that citizen lobbyists face. Facing new crops of congressional and State Department aides each legislative season, Frank must constantly reeducate people who find her accounts "too farfetched to be true." While she points to a handful of congressional advocates working to tie US aid to improvements in human rights, Frank portrays a federal government on automatic, ready to hold the status quo and bolster American economic and military power in Central America.
If there is any spot of brightness peeking through The Long Honduran Night, it is in the continued growth of a Honduran grassroots resistance. Frank calls being allied to them in their struggles a "beautiful gift" even as she condemns the US for continuing to "dance with dictators" in Central America. Her book is powerful, passionate, and meticulous in its documentation of foreign policy in Honduras, a country that has long been slighted in mainstream journalism and academic research.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Foreword Magazine, Inc.
http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
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Jagareski, Rachel. "The Long Honduran Night; Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup." ForeWord, 27 Oct. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A560334181/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=81fff97d. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.
Frank, Dana THE LONG HONDURAN NIGHT Haymarket (Adult Nonfiction) $17.95 11, 6 ISBN: 978-1-60846-960-4
A historian and activist offers a damning indictment of corruption, human rights violations, and failed U.S. policy in Honduras.
Frank (Emerita, History/Univ. of California, Santa Cruz; Women Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big: The 1937 Woolworth's Sit-Down, 2012, etc.) offers a heady mix of personal experience, historical context, and contemporary condemnation of the chain of events that brought Honduras into a state of chaos. She examines events in Honduras following the coup d'etat that ousted President Manuel Zelaya in 2009 and the constitutional crisis and regime that followed. Despite the author's lobbying of Congress to influence Honduran policy, the region destabilized and fell into a quagmire of corruption and violence. Also unhelpful were the State Department, which insultingly viewed Latin America as America's "backyard," and other areas of the U.S. government that consciously chose to look the other way even as it continued to "dance with dictators." These days, Honduras has a notorious reputation for violence, especially in the wake of its refugee crisis, exemplified by the much-publicized "caravan" of 57,000 undocumented, unaccompanied minors that fled Central American countries in 2014. "Those parents had known exactly how brutal the alternatives were at home," writes Frank. "Just like the parents who sent their kids north, they were trying to imagine, and build, a future for their loved ones." As to the cause, the author boldly calls it as it is: "But let's be clear: those gangs and drug traffickers took over a broad swath of daily life in Honduras in part because the elites who ran the government permitted and even profited from it. Who was the gang, in this story?" Readers who aren't invested in Latin American history or politics may find the political narrative somewhat lackluster, but the author's on-the-ground reports are gripping. Frank even finds times for a bit of dark humor: "When, exactly, did I start using the term 'axe murderer' all the time?"
An important, little-known history that offers much truth and little reconciliation.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Frank, Dana: THE LONG HONDURAN NIGHT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A557887129/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=61669604. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.
Frank, Dana WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION? Beacon Press (NonFiction None) $39.95 10, 8 ISBN: 9780807046906
A sweeping history of minority self-help in the face of the Great Depression.
If UC Santa Cruz historian Frank's book has a governing idea, it might be that, to quote Patti Smith, people have the power. In this instance, numerous people poleaxed by the Depression did not wait for the government to catch up, although Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal did help ease the suffering; instead, Frank's subjects, primarily minority members, formed mutual aid societies, helping the most affected with "burial insurance, health care, ethnic solidarity, and cultural sustenance." In some instances, she adds, these mutual-aid endeavors were long embedded in minority cultures excluded from such things as bank loans and mortgages. As Frank writes, Black communities across the country were hardest hit by the Depression, with more than 40 percent of men unemployed against slightly more than 27 percent of white men. Whites also formed mutual-aid societies, Frank adds, but these typically provided them "a way to draw a circle around themselves and keep out those who they identified as nonwhite." Frank describes other actions, including alittle-documented strike by Black wet nurses, whose own children were being monitored by the health department to make sure they were healthy and not being neglected. Not all popular actions were progressive or noble: one case study concerns the rise, mostly in the Midwest, of a KKK offshoot called the Black Legion, who terrorized nonwhite populations (which, in the eyes of Legion members, included Jews and Eastern and Southern Europeans). Frank suggests some level of cultural and social continuity in the fact that the Legion's heartland is the heavily gerrymandered congressional district that Jim Jordan now represents.
A well-crafted work of social history that highlights little-known aspects of pre-World War II America.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
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"Frank, Dana: WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION?" Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813883523/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=010386f8. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.