The University of Pittsburgh Department of History presents the 20th annual E.P. Thompson Memorial Lecture. Joe William Trotter Jr. is Giant Eagle Professor of History and Social Justice at Carnegie Mellon University and Director of the Center for African American Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE). His books include Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 (University of Illinois Press, 1985); Coal, Class and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915-32 (University of Illinois Press, 1990); River Jordan: African American Urban Life in the Ohio Valley (University Press of Kentucky, 1998); and (with Jared Day) Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh since World War II (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). He is currently completing a synthesis of black urban workers from the colonial era to the present, from which his lecture will be drawn.