Book Talk | María E. Montoya | A Workplace of Their Own: Progressive Management of Workers and their Families in Colorado’s Coal Fields

Join the Institute for Public Knowledge and the Past and Future of Work Group on Wednesday, November 4 (5:30-7:00 PM) for an event with María E. Montoya. She will discuss her book, A Workplace of Their Own: Progressive Management of Workers and their Families in Colorado’s Coal Fields, with Eduardo Contreras and Maia Silber.

María E. Montoya is a Global Network Associate Professor of History at New York University and the former Dean of Arts and Sciences at NYU Shanghai. She earned her BA, MA and PhD degrees at Yale University. She is the former President of the Western History Association, and recently elected as a Fellow to the American Antiquarian Society. Her research explores how workers and families in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have used natural resources to earn a living and make their homes in particular places in the American West. She is the author of numerous articles on the History of the American West, Environmental, Labor and Latina/o history, including her most recent piece in the Western Historical Quarterly, “Viewing the American West as A Chicana in China.” She is also the author of the book, Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840-1900. She is the lead author on the U.S. History textbook, Global Americans: A Social and Global History of the United States. Her new book, A Workplace of Their Own: Progressive Management of Workers and their Families in Colorado’s Coal Fields, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. It focuses on John D. Rockefeller and Josephine Roche, and their roles in defining the spheres of work and home life during the early 20th century. She is also working on another book project about the scarcity of water in the American Southwest, and the Rio Grande in particular.

Eduardo Contreras is an Associate Professor of United States history. He is the author of Latinos and the Liberal City: Politics and Protest in San Francisco (Penn Press). He’s now at work on “Central American Labor and U.S. Empire: From the Gold Rush to the Early 1930s,” an investigation of working people’s responses to U.S. corporate enterprises in Central America since the mid-nineteenth century. His research and teaching interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. history; U.S. Latina/e/o/x histories; labor, race, and migration; the U.S. empire; and modern Central America.

Maia Silber is an Assistant Professor of History at New York University. Her research examines the intersection of labor, political economy, and social history in the 20th-century United States, focusing on the ways that working people and their communities have interacted with state policy and politics. She is currently working on her first book, Odd Jobs: Work and Social Policy in the Age of Security. Challenging the assumption that the midcentury decades were characterized by stable, long-term work, it argues that the “steady job” was a contested political ideal rather than a widespread economic reality. New Deal policymakers associated irregular employment with poverty, vice, and social unrest. They sought to create a new model of work defined by workers’ continuous, structured attachment to the waged labor market. But despite their efforts, employment often remained precarious in the midcentury decades, and midcentury workers continued to rely on geographic migration, occupational mobility, and income from informal work to mitigate its hazards. Workers’ survival strategies confounded policymakers’ paradigms and generated new political conflicts about the meaning and terms of the “steady job.” Silber’s research has been supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, the University of Virginia’s Jefferson Scholars Foundation, and the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, among other sources. Her peer-reviewed articles have been published in History Workshop Journal and The Journal of Urban History. She has received the 2026 Katherine T. Preyer Prize from the American Society for Legal History and the 2023 Catherine Bauer Wurster Prize from the Society for American City and Regional Planning History. Silber has also written about labor and politics for publications including The New Yorker, The Nation, The Washington Post, The Drift, Jacobin. She is a fellow at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, where she is the co-founder and co-organizer of the “Past and Future of Work” group.