2023 Taft Award Winner Announced

Steven Beda, assistant professor of history at the University of Oregon, is the 2023 recipient of the Philip Taft Labor History Award at the Labor and Working-Class History Association conference, held at Rutgers University on May 18.

Sponsored by the ILR School, the honor recognizes the best book published in 2022 on American labor and working-class history. Taft Prize Committee members include Professor Ileen A. DeVault of ILR’s Global Labor and Work Department and Associate Professor Verónica Martínez-Matsuda, formerly of the ILR School and now with the University of California San Diego’s Department of History, as well as Labor & Working-Class History Association-appointed members Kimberley Phillips Boehm, Dennis Deslippe and Peter Cole.

Beda’s book, Strong Winds and Widow Makers: Workers, Nature, and Environmental Conflict in Pacific Northwest Timber Country, was published by the University of Illinois Press. It is based on his dissertation, which was the 2016 winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Prize for Outstanding Dissertation, awarded by the history association.

“Steven Beda places the experiences of workers at the very center of his beautifully written book showing us that for logging workers, their everyday relationship to the places where they lived and worked shaped their values about the forests and proper stewardship of the timber,” the committee wrote in a statement announcing the award. “The forests were their homes and their workplaces, as well as places to hunt, fish, and hike. Examining these issues, Beda’s study challenges popular narratives about the clashes between logging workers, environmentalists, and employers.”

The winner of the Taft Prize receives $2,000 and a plaque commemorating the honor.