August 19, 2025
Meghan O'Toole
Rudi Batzell publishes op-eds with student collaborator
Associate Professor of History Rudi Batzell wrote two op-eds recently published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Los Angeles Sentinel that build on his recently published book, Organizing Workers in the Shadow of Slavery: Global Inequality, Racial Boundaries, and the Rise of Unions in American and British Capitalism, 1870–1929.
Batzell’s book was published by The University of Chicago Press in April 2025.
In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Sunday Insight series, Batzell’s op-ed was published in print and online on August 3. In the op-ed, “Pittsburgher Kidnapped into Slavery: ICE Raids Today recall Fugitive Slave Law Fears,” Batzell connects recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids to the Fugitive Slave Laws that provided for the seizure and return of runaway enslaved people who escaped from one state into another or into a federal territory.
Another of Batzell’s op-eds, published July 30 in the Los Angeles Sentinel, the largest and oldest Black newspaper on the West Coast, followed a similar theme: “Resistance to ICE Recalls Resistance to Slavery in the 1850s.”
In the op-eds, Batzell draws parallels between responses to ICE agents’ tactics and responses to Federal Marshals who sought out those who fled enslavement. “Just as ICE agents are reported to police as kidnappers across Los Angeles, abolitionists in the 1850s derided Federal Marshals as kidnappers,” Batzell wrote in the Sentinel.
“The biggest surprise about doing historical research is how all of the work comes together in the end to form a narrative.”
Undergraduate research assistant Adriana Voloshchuk ’27 worked closely with Batzell on the projects.
“The biggest surprise about doing historical research is how all of the work comes together in the end to form a narrative,” Voloshchuk, a history and finance double major, said of the research experience. “I like to imagine it as putting together a puzzle—eventually all the pieces that you find throughout the course of the project hold their own place in the story, and it’s important to recognize and appreciate the individual roles they play as well as their greater part in our history.”
Batzell and Voloshchuk are continuing to work together this semester to co-author a scholarly article for an academic journal. The article will explore the previously unexamined 1851 kidnapping of Charles Wedley in Pittsburgh.