James Green is a historian and the author of six books on American labor and radical movements, including DEATH IN THE HAYMARKET: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America.

He received his BA from Northwestern University in 1966 and his PhD in History from Yale University in 1972 where he studied with C. Vann Woodward. He has taught at Brandeis and Warwick universities, served as Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the University of Genoa and as Professor of History and Labor Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1977 to 2014. He has lectured at the Harvard Trade Union Program since 1987 and he is currently a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and a member of the editorial board for the OAH’s Journal of American History.

Over the years, Green has been involved in a number of community and labor support activities, including community-based history workshops on Massachusetts with retired Lynn shoe workers, Lawrence textile workers; commemorative activities like the one in Boston’s Faneuil Hall where local union members who gathered in 1986 to mark the 100th anniversary of the May 1st eight-hour strikes, documentary films like “The Great Depression” series aired on the Public Broadcasting System in 1993, and preservation efforts, like the successful attempt to win National Landmark status for the restored monument to the victims of the 1914 Ludlow massacre in Colorado. Green has served a president of the Labor and Working Class History Association from 2002-04, and in 2009 he received the Sol Stetin Labor History Award from the Sidney Hillman Foundation.

Green was born in Oak Park, Illinois and raised in Carpentersville, IL. He now lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Books by James Green

The Devil is Here in These Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom

by James Green - History, Nonfiction

From before the dawn of the 20th century until the arrival of the New Deal, one of the most protracted and deadly labor struggles in American history was waged in West Virginia. The fight for unionization and civil rights sparked a political crisis verging on civil war that stretched from the creeks and hollows to the courts and the US Senate. In THE DEVIL IS HERE IN THESE HILLS, celebrated labor historian James Green tells the story of West Virginia and coal like never before.