Peter Cole

• E-mail: p-cole@wiu.edu.
• Department: Research Fellows

Peter Cole (1969) is a Professor of History at Western Illinois University with teaching and research interests in labor and working-class history of the United States and South Africa along with a commitment to public art + history. Cole researches the history of social movements, especially how workers and labor unions organize in ethnically and racially diverse societies. He also maintains scholarly interests in the history of African Americans, deindustrialization, South Africa, cities, technology, popular culture, historical memory, and the maritime world. He is a Research Associate in the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

Cole's most recent book was the novel, Presente: A Dockworker Story (2024), written by Herb Mills. Before he passed away in 2018. Mills asked Cole to see that this book would be published. While written as a novel, Presente is actually a thinly-veiled memoir about Mills's and his union's successful effort to refuse to load U.S. weapons for the military regime in El Salvador in 1980-81. Cole edited the novel and found it a publisher.

Ben Fletcher: The Life & Writings of a Black Wobbly (PM Press, 2021), is a much revised and greatly expanded version of one first published in 2006 (Charles H. Kerr Press). Though long forgotten, Fletcher was the leader of a revolutionary union that fought racism and xenophobia (and their employers) via the most integrated, militant union of WWI era America.

His previous book, Dockworker Power: Race & Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area (University of Illinois Press, 2018) won the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award. Dockworker Power brings to light surprising parallels in the experiences of dockers half a world away from each other. It also offers a new perspective on how workers can change their conditions and world.

Cole’s first monograph was Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia (University of Illinois Press, 2007). He also co-edited Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (Pluto Press, 2017). Both of these books were translated into French and published in 2021.

Cole is the founder and co-director of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project (CRR19). Along with co-director, Dr. Franklin Cosey-Gay of the University of Chicago, CRR19 seeks to use public art to remember the worst incident of racial violence in Chicago history—an event that profoundly contributed to the city’s notorious and persistent racial segregation. 

Dr. Cole has won multiple awards and grants at WIU including the Distinguished University Professorship and Provost’s Award for Excellence in Multicultural Teaching. He won the Germany Residency in American History, jointly operated by the Organization of American Historians and University of Tübingen, in 2018.

Dr. Cole was born and raised in suburban Miami, Florida. He received his B.A. in History from Columbia University (1991) and his Ph.D. in History, with distinction, from Georgetown University (1997).