My dissertation project is in the history of rank-and-file teachers’ organizing in the post-World War II period. Rather than write a narrative history of the subject, however, I am examining a series of case studies which highlight union democracy and the relationship between the history of teacher’s organizing and the history social movements. My chapters are on the following subjects: efforts to root out “subversion” in the public school system and teachers’ union in Los Angeles in the late 1940s through the 1960s; the strike by the American Federation of Teachers local at San Francisco State College, in solidarity with the Third World Student Strike in 1968-1969; the influence of the women’s movement on teachers’ unionism in the 1970s; queer rank-and-file teachers organizing against the Briggs Initiative in 1977-1978; and, finally, movements for union democracy and social justice within the United Teachers of Los Angeles in recent years.