Dear RSF:

Please join us in the library at 11:00 on Wednesday March 4 for Visiting Scholar Marisa Chappell’s presentation “ACORN: Working-Class Politics in America’s Second Gilded Age.”

Chappell received both her PhD in US History and MA in Liberal Studies from Northwestern, and a BA in History from Emory University.  She is Associate Professor of History at Oregon State University, specializing in 20th-century US history with a particular focus on politics, social policy, and the political economy of race and gender.  She has been at Oregon State since 2005.  Chappell is the author of The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty and Politics in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), one of Choice magazine’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2010.   

Chappell is working on a book that explores how the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), once the nation’s largest social justice organization, organized low- and moderate-income Americans to win political power locally and nationally. Using archival materials, Congressional records, press coverage, and interviews with former ACORN staff and members,

Chappell is examining how ACORN’s membership and campaigns—as well as sustained political efforts to discredit the organization—illuminate the trajectory of working-class politics over the last half-century.