Elizabeth McKillen
 My teaching and research specialties are in the history of U.S. foreign relations and U.S. labor history. Since coming to the University of Maine in 1992, I have regularly taught the two semester sequence in the history of U.S. foreign relations (HTY 473-474), U.S. labor history ( HTY 477), and the second half of the U.S. history survey (HTY 104). I also offer graduate courses in U.S. foreign relations and labor history, and have taught the senior seminar (HTY 498), and a seminar in immigration history. My research explores the importance of international political and economic issues in shaping both the workplace struggles and political subcultures of immigrant and native-born U.S. workers and considers the myriad ways in which U.S. workers have tried to exert international influence. My  research on workers and international affairs in the Mexican borderlands during World War I was funded by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies.  		Beth McKillen Photo

Dr. Elizabeth McKillen
Professor of History
207-581-1912
270A Stevens Hall
E-mail: Elizabeth.McKillen@umit.maine.edu

Representative Publications:

  • Chicago Labor and the Quest for a Democratic Diplomacy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

  • "Beyond Gompers: the AFL, the Creation of the ILO, and U.S. Labor Dissent" Forthcoming in History of the International Labor Organization (Peter Lang, 2009). 
  • “Pacifist Brawn and Silk-Stocking Militarism :Labor, Gender and Antiwar Politics, 1914-1918,” Peace and Change, 33 (July 2008):  388-425.
  • Hybrid Visions: Working-Class Internationalism in the Mexican  Borderlands, Seattle, and Chicago, 1910-1920," Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2:1 (Winter 2005): 77-107.    
  • "Organized Labor," in Encyclopedia of American Foreign Relations, 2nd ed., Alexander DeConde, et al., eds. (New York: Scribner, 2002): 45-60. 
  • "Ethnicity, Class, and Wilsonian Internationalism Reconsidered: The Mexican- and Irish-American Immigrant Left and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1914-1922," Diplomatic History 25 (Fall 2001): 553-87.
  • "American Labor, the Irish Revolution, and the Campaign for a Boycott of British Goods, 1916-1924," in Radical History Review 61 (Winter 1995), 35-61.
  • "The Corporatist Model, World War I, and the Public Debate over the League of Nations Battle," Diplomatic History 15 (Spring 1991): 171-197.

Book reviews and other articles in Journal of American History, Labor History, International Labor and Working Class History, Diplomatic History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Eire-Ireland, and Business History Review. Encyclopedia entries in The Oxford Companion to United States History, The Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, The Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working Class History, The Encyclopedia of the American Left, and The Encyclopedia of Chicago History.

Current Projects:

  • Presently at work on a book entitled "American Labor, the Immigrant Left, and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1910-1928"