Profile for John Grider
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John Grider
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Professor
History
University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
John Grider Pronouns: He/Him/His
Professor
History
Specialty area(s)
Maritime history, Labor & Working-class history, Native American history, and history of the American West
Current courses at UWL
HIS 110: World History
HIS 210: Survey of United States History
HIS 310: Native American History
HIS 324: Civil War and Reconstruction
HIS 377: United States Labor History
HIS 378: History of the US West
Education
Ph.D. History, University of Colorado
M.A. History, University of San Diego
B.A. History, University of California, Santa Cruz
Career
Teaching history
I teach a variety of courses on global history and United States history here at UWL. When teaching history to students I attempt to instill a sense that the past is about real people whose beliefs, actions, and daily lives have influenced and shaped the world. I also attempt to show students that history is more than a story about the powerful few, and that everyday people, who may seem powerless, play a major role in shaping the past and the future. For this reason, in addition to teaching General Education courses in global history, I teach courses in United States labor and working class history, Native American history, maritime history, and the history of the American West. By uncovering the role played by the often nameless and faceless masses, students come to realize that they too are a part of history and that their decisions today will affect future generations.
Professional history
Selected Awards
Fulbright Scholarship, 2024, South Africa
The Keith Matthews Award: Best Article of 2014, The Canadian Nautical research Society, 2015
Fellowship, “The American Maritime People”: National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for College and University Teachers, hosted by the Munson Institute, Mystic Seaport, the Museum of America and the Sea, June 21-July 30, 2010
Winner of the 2006 University of Colorado Graduate Committee on the Arts and Humanities Dissertation Award
Thomas Edwin Devaney Dissertation Fellowship, University of Colorado Center for Humanities and the Arts, 2005-2006
Research and publishing
My research primarily examines how work and labor identity changed aboard American merchant vessels in the Pacific during the nineteenth century. Sailors built a maritime community and culture in the Atlantic that promoted masculinity and ethnic and racial tolerance among seamen. During the nineteenth century, sailors encountered Pacific Islanders and Asians who quickly sought to enter the maritime labor community aboard foreign vessels. New to the maritime world developed in the Atlantic, Pacific peoples brought their own cultural values and masculine identities onto ships that did not always mesh well with traditional maritime customs and work habits. Some Pacific peoples, such as Polynesians, Micronesians, and Melanesians, fit well into the maritime community, while other Pacific peoples, like the Chinese, did not. I argue that the influx of Pacific peoples into the maritime labor force during the second half of the nineteenth century, combined with advances in maritime technologies forced sailors to reevaluate and alter the way they perceived themselves and their labor. Sailors, once tolerant and accepting, became intolerant and abusive towards Asians and refused to serve with them aboard ships and denied them membership in maritime unions. Ultimately, racial segregation harmed seamen by pitting sailors against each other, allowing employers to exploit worker divisiveness.
Selected Publications
"'For Those People's Pleasure': The Pacific Islands and Sailor Eroticism in the 19th Century," Exploring Erotic Encounters: The Inescapable Entanglement of Tradition, Transcendence and Transgression (2018)
A Foreign Voyage: Pacific Maritime Labour Identity, 1840-1890. (2017)
"'Tis a Shameful Confession I Now Must Make’: Steamships and the Pacific Maritime Community," The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord (May 2014)
"Sailors, States, and Employers in the Construction of Masculine Maritime Identity," Politics, Groups, and Identities (May 2013)
'I Espied a Chinaman': Chinese Sailors and the Fracturing of the 19th Century Pacific Maritime Labor Force, in Maritime Slavery, edited by Philip D. Morgan (London: Routledge, 2012)
"'An Overstrained Sense of Manliness': The Atlantic Origins of Pacific Maritime Identity," Sexuality & Politics (July 2010)
“‘I Espied a Chinaman’: The Chinese and 19th Century Pacific Maritime Labor,” Slavery and Abolition (September 2010)