Labor History Links

Historical records pertaining to "silent agitators" or "stickerettes" produced by the U.S. Industrial Workers of the World (1910s-present), including materials related to I.W.W. labor activist, artist, and songwriter Ralph Chaplin (American, 1987-1961). The digital image collection was curated by Catherine Tedford, St. Lawrence University, based on research conducted at U.S. library archives and from online sources; additional digital records were provided by DJ Alperovitz x36463 of the I.W.W. Materials Preservation Project.

In the popular imagination of what constitutes the Midwest, the African American presence is often obscured or missing altogether. When the African American presence in the Midwest does get mentioned, more often than not it's focused on representing black folks as a problem to be solved. Therefore, this digital collection offers a corrective on two separate historical accounts. Between the tendencies of being absent from the narrative or identified as a "problem," we can locate black Midwesterners - and let their words and experiences speak for themselves.

Exhibit and digitized archival material, 1870-1890. A new exhibit from MosaicNC, now available online, explores the life and legacy of the thousands of incarcerated laborers who worked on the Western North Carolina Railroad during the 1870s and 1880s. Featuring over 160 documents from the State Archives of North Carolina, as well as archaeological findings, work on this project was completed by Cayla Colclasure, a PhD student at UNC involved in the recent archaeological investigations at Cowee Tunnel, located in Jackson County near Dillsboro, NC.
Laying the Tracks: The History of the Western North Carolina Railroad
Life on the Rails: Workers' Living and Working Conditions on the Railroad
People Imprisoned: Remembering the Lives of Incarcerated Workers
The Story Lives On: Incarcerated Laborers' Legacy Today

In November 1933, the Socialist Party of Bridgeport, Connecticut put slate roofer Jasper McLevy in the mayor's seat and nearly won control of the city council. Cecelia Bucki explores how labor gained first a foothold and then a stronghold in local politics as broad debates pitted previously unengaged working-class citizens against local business leaders and traditional party elites.

In the heat of the Great Depression, the skilled union craftsmen who made up the bulk of the city's Socialist Party filled a political void created by the crumbling of mainstream parties, the disintegration of traditional modes of ethnic politics, and the city's acute fiscal crisis. In time, however, legislative measures and compromise politics blunted the progressive agenda. The local party split from the Socialist Party of America and became narrowly focused and reformist while still serving as the voice of the working class.

A portrait of a stunning moment in American politics, Bridgeport's Socialist New Deal, 1915-36 offers a fascinating look at the volatility of politics in the early years of the Great Depression.

This essay provides an overview of labor/business history in Connecticut. This essay may be utilized by educators teaching labor history as subject knowledge enrichment and may be provided to students as an overview of this topic

Nearly a century before it became known as Silicon Valley, the Santa Clara Valley was world-renowned for something else: the succulent fruits and vegetables grown in its fertile soil. Virtually all farms were owned by whites, but the soil was largely worked by Asian immigrants. In this book, Cecilia Tsu tells the overlooked and intertwined histories of the land of the Santa Clara Valley and the Asian immigrants who cultivated it

"In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand Black people’s history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of Black people and Black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism, Robinson argues, must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of Blacks on Western continents, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this. To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by Blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century Black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright. This revised and updated third edition includes a new preface by Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, and a new foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley."

Right to Work states weaken collective bargaining rights and limit the ability of unions to effectively advocate on behalf of workers. As more and more states consider enacting right-to-work laws, observers trace the contemporary attack on organized labor to the 1980s and the Reagan era. In The Origins of Right to Work, however, Cedric de Leon contends that this antagonism began a century earlier with the Northern victory in the U.S. Civil War, when the political establishment revised the English common-law doctrine of conspiracy to equate collective bargaining with the enslavement of free white men. In doing so, de Leon connects past and present, raising critical questions that address pressing social issues. Drawing on the changing relationship between political parties and workers in nineteenth-century Chicago, de Leon concludes that if workers' collective rights are to be preserved in a global economy, workers must chart a course of political independence and overcome long-standing racial and ethnic divisions."--Publisher's website

In 2012, the Center for the History of the New America (now the Center for Global Migration Studies) established the Archive of Immigrant Voices to collect stories of the experience of migration. The purpose of the archive is to create, accumulate, and preserve a repository of memories that will not only reveal living history and features of the recent past, but will also document the fine lines of social change that might be otherwise ignored or lost to history. These stories will provide the basis for understanding how newcomers adapt to challenges and successes. The Archive unites the Center's mission to advance scholarship and teaching while enhancing the Center's connection to migrant communities by capturing, recording, and preserving the experience of migration, dislocation, and community formation as immigrants, asylum-seekers, refugees, and other newcomers themselves understood it. In addition to housing these oral interviews, the Archive also contains further information on the history of immigration, educator resources, and tools for conducting oral histories.

Interviews represent a way to capture and preserve the stories of recent immigrants to the United States as a source for scholars, a classroom tool for teachers, and a resource enabling immigrants themselves to share their experiences and memories.

In 2012, the Center for the History of the New America (now the Center for Global Migration Studies) established the Archive of Immigrant Voices to collect stories of the experience of migration. The purpose of the archive is to create, accumulate, and preserve a repository of memories that will not only reveal living history and features of the recent past, but will also document the fine lines of social change that might be otherwise ignored or lost to history. These stories will provide the basis for understanding how newcomers adapt to challenges and successes. The Archive unites the Center's mission to advance scholarship and teaching while enhancing the Center's connection to migrant communities by capturing, recording, and preserving the experience of migration, dislocation, and community formation as immigrants, asylum-seekers, refugees, and other newcomers themselves understood it. In addition to housing these oral interviews, the Archive also contains further information on the history of immigration, educator resources, and tools for conducting oral histories.

Interviews represent a way to capture and preserve the stories of recent immigrants to the United States as a source for scholars, a classroom tool for teachers, and a resource enabling immigrants themselves to share their experiences and memories.

The Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) is a think tank and an educational institute devoted to the study of international migration, to the promotion of understanding between immigrants and receiving communities, and to public policies that safeguard the dignity and rights of migrants, refugees, and newcomers.

key events from 1835 to 2016

Oral history interviews with organizers and rank-and-file who were involved with the Service Employees International Union’s Justice for Janitors campaign, 1980s-2010s

Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employers and powerful individuals deployed a variety of tactics to control ordinary people as they sought to secure power in and out of workplaces. This book suggests that the birth of law and order politics as we know it can be found in nineteenth-century campaigns of organized terror against an assortment of ordinary people across racial lines conducted by Klansmen, lawmen, vigilantes, and union busters.

In a fusion of labor and environmental history, Montrie examines work as a central part of Americans' evolving relationship with nature, revealing the unexpected connections between the fight for workers' rights and the rise of the modern environmental movement. Montrie offers six case studies and shows how increasingly organized and mechanized production drove a wedge between workers and nature--and how workers fought back. Workers' resistance not only addressed wages and conditions, he argues, but also planted the seeds of environmental reform and environmental justice activism. Workers played a critical role in raising popular consciousness, pioneering strategies for enacting environmental regulatory policy, and initiating militant local protest. From publisher description.
Chad Montrie offers six case studies: textile "mill girls" in antebellum New England, plantation slaves and newly freed sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, homesteading women in the Kansas and Nebraska grasslands, native-born coal miners in southern Appalachia, autoworkers in Detroit, and Mexican and Mexican American farm workers in southern California. Montrie shows how increasingly organized and mechanized production drove a wedge between workers and nature--and how workers fought back. Workers' resistance not only addressed wages and conditions, he argues, but also planted the seeds of environmental reform and environmental justice activism. Workers played a critical role in raising popular consciousness, pioneering strategies for enacting environmental regulatory policy, and initiating militant local protest.

Since its publication in 1962, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring has often been celebrated as the catalyst that sparked an American environmental movement. Yet environmental consciousness and environmental protest in some regions of the United States date back to the nineteenth century, with the advent of industrial manufacturing and the consequent growth of cities. As these changes transformed people's lives, ordinary Americans came to recognize the connections between economic exploitation, social inequality, and environmental problems. As the modern age dawned, they turned to labor unions, sportsmen’s clubs, racial and ethnic organizations, and community groups to respond to such threats accordingly. The Myth of Silent Spring tells this story. By challenging the canonical “songbirds and suburbs” interpretation associated with Carson and her work, the book gives readers a more accurate sense of the past and better prepares them for thinking and acting in the present.
Contents: Introduction: “The Fight for a Balanced Environment and the Fight for Social Justice and Dignity Are Not Unrelated Struggles”
1. “I Think Less of the Factory Than of My Native Dell”
2. “Why Don’t They Dump the Garbage on the Bully-Vards?”
3. “Massive Mobilization for a Great Citizen Crusade”
Conclusion: “They Keep Threatening Us with the Loss of Our Jobs”

Surface coal mining has had a dramatic impact on the Appalachian economy and ecology since World War II, exacerbating the region's chronic unemployment and destroying much of its natural environment. Here, Chad Montrie examines the twentieth-century movement to outlaw surface mining in Appalachia, tracing popular opposition to the industry from its inception through the growth of a militant movement that engaged in acts of civil disobedience and industrial sabotage. To Save the Land and People chronicles the story of surface mining opposition in the whole region, from Pennsylvania to Alabama. Though many accounts of environmental activism focus on middle-class suburbanites and emphasize national events, the campaign to abolish strip mining was primarily a movement of farmers and working people, originating at the local and state levels. Its history underscores the significant role of common people and grassroots efforts in the American environmental movement. This book also contributes to a long-running debate about American values by revealing how veneration for small, private properties has shaped the political consciousness of strip mining opponents

Historians have characterized the open-shop movement of the early twentieth century as a cynical attempt by business to undercut the labor movement by twisting the American ideals of independence and self-sufficiency to their own ends. The precursors to today's right-to-work movement, advocates of the open shop in the Progressive Era argued that honest workers should have the right to choose whether or not to join a union free from all pressure. At the same time, business owners systematically prevented unionization in their workplaces. While most scholars portray union opponents as knee-jerk conservatives, Chad Pearson demonstrates that many open-shop proponents identified themselves as progressive reformers and benevolent guardians of America's economic and political institutions. By exploring the ways in which employers and their allies in journalism, law, politics, and religion drew attention to the reformist, rather than repressive, character of the open-shop movement, Pearson's book forces us to consider the origins, character, and limitations of this movement in new ways. Throughout his study, Pearson describes class tensions, noting that open-shop campaigns primarily benefited management and the nation's most economically privileged members at the expense of ordinary people. Pearson's analysis of archives, trade journals, newspapers, speeches, and other primary sources elucidates the mentalities of his subjects and their times, rediscovering forgotten leaders and offering fresh perspectives on well-known figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, Booker T. Washington and George Creel. Reform or Repression sheds light on businessmen who viewed strong urban-based employers' and citizens' associations, weak unions, and managerial benevolence as the key to their own, as well as the nation's, progress and prosperity."
Introduction. Reformers and fighters: employers and the labor problem
Part I. Nation. Fighting "union dictation": birth of the open-shop movement
"For the protection of the common people": citizens, progressives, and "free workers"
Part II. Region. A tale of two men: class traitors and strikebreaking in Cleveland
Avenging McKinley: organized employers in Buffalo
Making the "city of prosperity": the poetry of industrial harmony in Worcester
"A solid south for the open shop": N.F. Thompson and the labor solution
Conclusion. Creating the "common good": individual rights, industrial progress, and virtuous citizenship

From the 1870s to the 1930s, the Lake Superior Ojibwes of Minnesota and Wisconsin faced dramatic economic, political, and social changes. Examining a period that began with the tribe's removal to reservations and closed with the Indian New Deal, Chantal Norrgard explores the critical link between Ojibwes' efforts to maintain their tribal sovereignty and their labor traditions and practices. As Norrgard explains, the tribe's ""seasonal round"" of subsistence-based labor was integral to its survival and identity. Though encroaching white settlement challenged these labor practices, Ojibwe people

In the early twentieth century, two panics emerged in the United States. The Black Scare was rooted in white Americans' fear of Black Nationalism and dread at what social, economic, and political equality of Black people might entail. The Red Scare, sparked by communist uprisings abroad and subversion at home, established anticapitalism as a force capable of infiltrating and disrupting the American order. In Black Scare / Red Scare, Charisse Burden-Stelly meticulously outlines the conjoined nature of these state-sanctioned panics, revealing how they unfolded together as the United States pursued capitalist domination. Antiradical repression, she shows, is inseparable from anti-Black oppression, and vice versa. Beginning her account in 1917--the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, the East St. Louis Race Riot, and the Espionage Act--

Burden-Stelly traces the long duration of these intertwined and mutually reinforcing phenomena. She theorizes two bases of the Black Scare/Red Scare: US Capitalist Racist Society, a racially hierarchical political economy built on exploitative labor relationships, and Wall Street Imperialism, the violent processes by which businesses and the US government structured domestic and foreign policies to consolidate capital and racial domination.

In opposition, Radical Blackness embodied the government's fear of both Black insurrection and Red instigation. The state's actions and rhetoric therefore characterized Black anticapitalists as foreign, alien, and undesirable. This reactionary response led to an ideology that Burden-Stelly calls True Americanism, the belief that the best things about America were absolutely not Red and not Black, which were interchangeable threats.

Black Scare / Red Scare illuminates the anticommunist nature of the US and its governance, but also shines a light on a misunderstood tradition of struggle for Black liberation. Burden-Stelly highlights the Black anticapitalist organizers working within and alongside the international communist movement and analyzes the ways the Black Scare/Red Scare reverberates through ongoing suppression of Black radical activism today. Drawing on a range of administrative, legal, and archival sources, Burden-Stelly incorporates emancipatory ideas from several disciplines to uncover novel insights into Black political minorities and their legacy"--Provided by publisher
Table of Contents
Part I. Black Scare / Red Scare Foundation: Political Economy and the Threat of Radical Blackness
1. Theorizing US Capitalist Racist Society
2. The Black Scare, the Red Scare, and the Threat of Radical Blackness
3. Genres of Radical Blackness
4. The Negro Question as a National Question, the Structural Location of Blackness, and the Problem of Black Self-Determination
5. Wall Street Imperialism and Expropriation Abroad
6. War, Wall Street Imperialism, (Inter-)National Accumulation

Part II. Black Scare / Red Scare Codification: Governance and Legitimating Architecture
7. Theorizing Anticommunism as a Mode of Governance
8. Loyalty, Criminality, and “Clear and Present Danger”: The Anticommunist Governance of the Executive and Judicial Branches
9. Sedition, Subversion, and National Security: The Anticommunist Governance of the Legislative Branch
10. The Countersubversive Political Tradition and the Threat of US Fascism
11. True Americanism: The Legitimating Architecture of US Capitalist Racist Society

Written by Charles Conant, Wall Street advisor to four presidents, there is no better document to illustrate the way elite thought on social Darwinism connected to labor and consumer issues and underscored the need for capital to dominate the globe. Conant's work arguing that imperialism is a natural outgrowth of capitalist economics, to the extent that "it is a result of a natural law of economic and race development." Framed in positive rather than critical terms, Conant suggests that economically mature and industrialized nations should pursue imperialism as a means of solving capitalism's problem of surplus accumulation.

An excerpt that shows the underhanded methods of the Pinkertons in late 19th century. With 2,000 active agents and 30,000 reserves, the forces of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency were larger than the nation’s standing army in the late-19th century. The Pinkertons provided services for management in labor disputes, including armed guards and secret operatives like Charles A. Siringo. A Texas native and former cowboy, Siringo moved to Chicago in 1886, where first-hand observation of the city’s labor conflict (which he attributed to foreign anarchism) moved him to join the Pinkertons. Angry with the agency after it sabotaged the publication of his cowboy memoirs, Siringo published Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism, a revealing chronicle of Pinkerton methods and deception. Guarding its reputation, the Pinkerton Agency succeeded in suppressing the book. Operatives bought up all copies available at newsstands and a court order confiscated the book’s plates. In the following passage from Two Evil Isms, Siringo (who, even when alienated from the Pinkertons, never displayed any sympathy for the labor movement) described how he infiltrated and undermined miners' unions in northern Idaho during the 1892 Coeur d’Alene strike.

In 1921 Blair Mountain in southern West Virginia was the site of the country's bloodiest armed insurrection since the Civil War, a battle pitting miners led by Frank Keeney against agents of the coal barons intent on quashing organized labor. It was the largest labor uprising in US history. Ninety years later, the site became embroiled in a second struggle, as activists came together to fight the coal industry, state government, and the military-industrial complex in a successful effort to save the battlefield-sometimes dubbed "labor's Gettysburg"--Destruction by mountaintop removal mining. A success story for historic preservation and environmentalism, it serves as an example of how rural, grassroots organizations can defeat the fossil fuel industry"-- Provided by publisher

Charles Ball was one of many former slaves who escaped sla- very, but one of the comparatively few of these individuals who could or did write about his experiences in bondage. Here Ball describes what he experienced as a typical day at work on a large Southern slave plantation during the mid-nineteenth century.

From Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains or, the Life of an American Slave (NY: 1859) 117-122

Charles Ball was born a slave around 1785 in Calvert County, Maryland. When he was four years old, his family was broken up by the sale of his mother. As a young man he was separated from his wife and children and sold to a slave trader. The journey described here occurred after that sale. Ball carefully observed his route and later used that knowledge to escape from a South Carolina cotton plantation and return to his family in Maryland. After his escape, Ball lived as a free man in Maryland and Washington, D.C. When his wife died, he remarried, established a new family, and farmed his own property near Baltimore. This period of happiness, however, did not last. Ball and his family were captured, separated, and dragged back into slavery. Although Ball managed to escape again, his family did not. He dictated this memoir while living in Philadelphia, free, but still fearful of recapture.