Roger Horowitz


Roger Horowitz is a New York-born business, technology, and Labor history of [the United States|labor] historian. He is an expert on food history, and has written about meat production and consumption in the United States. He is the director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library where he manages programs encouraging the use of Hagley's research collections in business, political, and social history. There, he also develops and organizes annual academic conferences, public lectures, and seminar series. He also works as an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware Department of History as well as an independent consultant on oral history.
WWW Official Site

Career

Horowitz attended the University of Chicago, where he obtained a BA in History in 1982. Seven years later he got a PhD in History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is author of several books, including KOSHER USA which explores kosher food through the modern industrial food system, and Meatpackers, coauthored with Rick Halpern, in which they study trade unions and their fight for and labor rights in cities like Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, Fort Worth, Waterloo, and Iowa. His research on American food history, labor, industry, and technology has also been published in refereed journals and book chapters.
Roger Horowitz has had a long career serving the Business History Conference in various capacities. Horowitz began his service to the BHC as Secretary-Treasurer, a position he held from 1999 to 2018. In this role, he was responsible for overseeing the organization's finances and maintaining its records.

Authored books

  • KOSHER USA: How Coke became kosher and other tales of modern food.
  • Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation.
  • "Negro and White, Unite and Fight!" A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930‑1990,.
  • Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality, with Rick Halpern

Edited books

  • Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart, co-edited with Warren Belasco.
  • Boys and Their Toys?: Masculinity, Technology, and Class.
  • His & Hers: Gender, Consumption, and Technology co-edited with Arwen Mohun.

Journal articles

  • , American Jewish History 103, 4.
  • , Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 5, 2.American Historical Review 109, 4, pages 1055–83, co-authors Jeffrey Pilcher and Sydney Watts..
  • , Oral History Review 26,1, pages 23–43
  • , Technology and Culture, 38, 1, pages 187–213, reprinted in Gender and Technology: A Reader, edited by Nina E. Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, and Arwen P. Mohun, and The Gender of Artifacts, edited by Maria Rentetzi in Greek.
  • Be Loyal to Your Industry': J. Frank Gordy, Jr., the Cooperative Extension Service, and the Making of A Business Community in the Delmarva Poultry Industry, 1945–1970", Delaware History, 27, 1–2, pages 1–18.
  • , Journal of American History 82, 2, pages 617–624.
  • It Wasn't A Time to Compromise': The Unionization of Sioux City's Packinghouses, 1937 1942", Annals of Iowa 50, pages 238 265.
  • It Is Harder To Struggle Than To Surrender': The Rank and File Unionism of the United Packing¬house Workers of America, 1933 ¬1948¬", Studies in History and Politics 5, pages 83 96.

Awards

In 2018 Horowitz received the Forest C. Pogue Award for Lifetime Achievement in Oral History, from the non-profit organization Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region and in 2017 he received both the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies from the Jewish Book Council and the Dorothy Rosenberg Prize for the History of the Jewish diaspora, from the American Historical Association.