Thomas Wirth
AB--G10
607-777-6769
ctah@binghamton.edu

Tom is a doctoral candidate in history at Binghamton University and works under the direction of Dr. Thomas Dublin. He focuses on U.S. labor, political, and environmental history during the first half of the twentieth century. Tom is currently writing his dissertation, entitled "Laboring to Learn: Workers' Education, Socialism, and the Transformation of Labor Politics in New York City, 1891-1956." This study considers the impact of political education on a maturing socialist workers' politics in New York between 1890 and 1919 and discusses its subsequent ramifications for the development of formal systems of union education and the evolving character of labor politics in the U.S. between 1920 and 1950.

Tom has published articles in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies and the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Most recently he contributed an essay to a forthcoming volume on the environmental history of Philadelphia entitled, Nature's Entrepot: Philadelphia's Urban Sphere and its Environmental Thresholds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), and has written two entries for the fourth volume of a new Encyclopedia of U.S. Political History (Congressional Quarterly Press, 2009).

Originally from Amherst, New York, Tom holds a Master's Degree in History from Villanova University and Bachelor's Degree in History and Political Science from the State University of New York at Geneseo.