From 2001-2005, Dr. James J. Lorence served as Eminent Scholar of History at Gainesville State College in Gainesville, GA. Lorence is currently Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Wisconsin-Marathon County, where he taught United States History for thirty-five years. In 2000, he received the Wisconsin Humanities Council’s Governor’s Humanities Award for Excellence in Public Humanities Scholarship. Author of nine books and more than thirty articles, his recent research has focused on labor history and film studies. Numerous publications include Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America (University of New Mexico Press, 1999), Organizing the Unemployed: Community and Union Activists in the Industrial Heartland (SUNY Press, 1996) and Screening America: United States History Through Film Since 1900 (Longmans, 2006). In 2000, Suppression of Salt of the Earth received the Western History Association’s Robert G. Athearn Award for Best Book on the 20th Century West and the Council of Wisconsin Writers’ Kenneth Kingery Scholarly Award. As Gainesville College’s Eminent Scholar, he conducted research on Georgia history, with emphasis on the 1930s.
His most recent publications are A Hard Journey: The Life of Don West (U.of Illinois Press, 2007), which won the Appalachian Studies Association’s Weatherford Award in 2008 and The Unemployed People’s Movement: Leftists, Liberals, and Labor in Georgia, 1929-1941(University of Georgia Press, 2009). Since his return to Wausau in 2006, he has continued research on American labor history.