Contentious Cosmopolitans: Black Public History and Civil Rights in Cold War Chicago, 1942-1972

This dissertation looks at how teachers, unionists, and cultural workers used black history to offer new ways of thinking about racial knowledge from a local level. Numerous efforts to promote and teach this history demonstrated how dissident cosmopolitan political currents from previous decades remained relevant to a vibrant and ideologically diffuse African American public sphere despite widespread Cold War dispersions, white supremacist reactions, and anticommunist repressions.;My argument proceeds by demonstrating how these public history projects coalesced around a series of connected pedagogical endeavors. These endeavors included the work of school teachers on Chicago's South side who tried to advance curriculum reforms through World War II and afterwards, the work of packinghouse workers and other union-focused educators who used anti-discrimination campaigns to teach about the history of African Americans and Mexican Americans in the labor movement and to advance innovative models for worker education, and the activities of important cultural workers like Margaret and Charles Burroughs who politicized urban space and fought for greater recognition of black history in the public sphere through the advancement of their vision for a museum.;Collectively, these projects expressed important ideas about race, citizenship, education and intellectual labors that engaged closely with the rapidly shifting terrains of mid-20th Century civil rights and international anti-colonialisms. Ultimately, this dissertation offers a social history about how cosmopolitan cultural work in public history and similar forms of knowledge production were at the intersections of political realities and lived experience in U.S. urban life.