During his time at Northwestern, Green was deeply influenced by three seminal events of 1963: President John F. Kennedy's civil rights address on national television on June 11; the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers later that same evening; Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28; and the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22.

More than 15,000 people jammed the Yale campus from Friday through Sunday to protest the arrest and murder trial of Black Panther leader Bobby Seale.

He became involved in the British History Workshop, a group of historians who focused research on workers and local movements rather than national trends, markets and large organizations.

In 1977, Green left Brandeis and was appointed an associate professor of history and labor studies in the College of Public and Community Service at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

In December of that year and into early 1978, Green worked in West Virginia, covering a national strike by coal miners who had defied (for a few days) a Taft-Hartley Act back-to-work order by President Jimmy Carter.

In 1981, he created a labor studies major at UMass-Boston, and started teaching leadership training workshops for unions such as the United Mine Workers of America.

Documentary film-maker Barbara Kopple, commissioned to create a centennial history of the United Mine Workers, was there filming the strike and employed Green as a consultant.

In 1992 and 1993, Green worked as a research director and consultant on "The Great Depression," an award-winning seven-part documentary series produced by Blackside, Inc. which aired on PBS.

In 2014 the producers of the PBS series American Experience secured the rights to Green's forthcoming book (Publication Date: Feb. 2015) on the West Virginia Mine Wars.

Writing in a colloquial style, Green discussed how important historical events such as the Haymarket riot, the Bread and Roses strike, and the civil rights movement influenced his own life.

In many ways, the book is a written example of Green's lifelong struggle to take history out of the ivory tower and make it come alive and be relevant to working people and community activists.

Green's next book, The Devil is Here in these Hills: West Virginia's Coal Miners and their Battle for Freedom was published by Grove Atlantic in 2015.

He was a Woodrow Wilson Foundation fellow in 1966, and he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1977 to deliver a series of public lectures on Boston-area labor unions.

In 1983, Green's introduction to the reprint edition of Oscar Ameringer's autobiography, If You Don't Weaken, received the Bryant Spann Memorial Prize from the Eugene V. Debs Foundation as the best scholarly work of the year concerning social reform or radical activism.

In 2009, The Sidney Hillman Foundation presented Green with the Sol Stetin award for his achievements in the field of labor history, "researching and telling the stories of working people's lives."

[4] Green helped negotiate an agreement which led to the founding of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, which is co-published by LAWCHA and Duke University Press.