Associate Professor and Chair
Tami J. Friedman (B.A., Wisconsin; M.A., Ph.D., Columbia) teaches 20th-century U.S. history, including the post-1865 U.S. history survey and courses on U.S. foreign policy, the Cold War, the 1960s, and women in North America. Her graduate courses explore women and work in U.S. history and conservatism in modern America.
Her current research focuses on industrial migration within the United States after World War II, emphasizing the impact of economic restructuring on workers and communities and the role of public policy in facilitating capital flight. Her book manuscript, tentatively entitled Communities in Competition: Capital Migration and Plant Relocation in the U.S. Carpet Industry, 1929-1975, is in progress.
Her article, “Exploiting the North-South Differential: Corporate Power, Southern Politics, and the Decline of Organized Labor after World War II,” won the 2009 Binkley-Stephenson Award from the Organization of American Historians for the best scholarly article published in the Journal of American History in 2008.
Dr. Friedman has also published articles in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas and several edited volumes, including: Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization, eds. Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott (Cornell, 2003); Life and Labor in the New New South, ed. Robert H. Zieger (Florida, 2012); The Right and Labor in America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination, eds. Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (Pennsylvania, 2012); and Capital Gains: Business and Politics in Twentieth-Century America, eds. Richard J. John and Kim Phillips-Fein (Pennsylvania, 2017).
She speaks to the media on U.S. politics, racial conflict, women’s reproductive rights, and other contemporary topics. She regularly supervises MA students interested in US foreign policy, women’s history, and labor history and is happy to discuss supervision in other areas.
Research interests
20th-century United States, history of capitalism, social history of economic change, labor history, public policy, U.S. South, race relations, and intersections of class, gender, race, and ethnicity.