"A Widespread Superstition": The Purported Invulnerability of Workers of Color to Occupational Heat Stress.

This study explores the history of the denial of the vulnerability of non-White workers to risks of heat illness. Defenders of chattel slavery argued for the capacity of workers of African descent to tolerate extreme environmental temperatures. In Hawai'i, advocates of racial segregation emphasized the perils to Whites of strenuous work in tropical climates and the advantages of using Chinese immigrants. Growing reliance on Mexican immigrants in agriculture and other outdoor employment in the early 20th century brought forth claims of their natural suitability for unhealthful working conditions. These efforts to naturalize racial hierarchy fell apart after 1930. The Great Depression subverted the notion that people of European descent could not endure hot work. More rigorous investigation refuted contentions of racial difference in heat tolerance.

Inventing the Right to Know: Herbert Abrams's Efforts to Democratize Access to Workplace Health Hazard Information in the 1950s.

In the 1980s, the right-to-know movement won American workers unprecedented access to information about the health hazards they faced on the job. The precursors and origins of these initiatives to extend workplace democracy remain quite obscure. This study brings to light the efforts of one of the early proponents of wider dissemination of information related to hazard recognition and control. Through his work as a state public health official and as an advisor to organized labor in the 1950s, Herbert Abrams was a pioneer in advocating not only broader sharing of knowledge but also more expansive rights of workers and their organizations to act on that knowledge.

"Nuisance dust": unprotective limits for exposure to coal mine dust in the United States, 1934-1969.

I examine the dismissal of coal mine dust as a mere nuisance, not a potentially serious threat to extractive workers who inhaled it. In the 1930s, the US Public Health Service played a major role in conceptualizing coal mine dust as virtually harmless. Dissent from this position by some federal officials failed to dislodge either that view or the recommendation of minimal limitations on workplace exposure that flowed from it. Privatization of regulatory authority after 1940 ensured that miners would lack protection against respiratory disease. The reform effort that overturned the established misunderstanding in the late 1960s critically depended upon both the production of scientific findings and the emergence of a subaltern movement in the coalfields. This episode illuminates the steep challenges often facing advocates of stronger workplace health standards.

"Health for three-thirds of the nation": public health advocacy of universal access to medical care in the United States.

The public health community has made important, original contributions to the debate over universal access to health services in the United States. Well before the decision of the American Public Health Association in 1944 to endorse a health plan encompassing virtually the entire populace, prominent public health practitioners and scholars embraced universality as an essential principle of health policy. Influenced by Arthur Newsholme, C.-E. A. Winslow began to promote this principle in the 1920s. Many others came to justify universal medical care as a corollary of the traditional ideal of all-inclusive public health services. By the 1940s, most leaders in the field saw national health insurance as the best way to attain universal access. For the past 30 years, advocates of universalism have asserted a social right to health services.