Peter Rachleff has a Ph.D from the University of Pittsburgh and has been a labor history professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota since 1982. He likes to confuse his students by telling them that he became a historian because he is interested in the future. His published works include Black Labor in Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1890 (University of Illinois Press, 1989) and Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement (South End Press, 1993). For the past decade, he has been researching the labor movement of the 1930s to better understand the ways in which it crossed barriers between race, ethnicity, and gender. Rachleff works to blend activism and scholarship. In the mid-1980s, for instance, he was chairperson of the Twin Cities Support Committee for the Hormel strikers, and since 1990, he has chaired the Meeting the Challenge Committee, a group of union activists that provides support for labor struggles across America and organizes an annual conference that brings together activists from around the country.