Labor History Links

In Clearing the Air, Gregory Wood examines smoking's importance to the social and cultural history of working people in the twentieth-century United States. Now that most workplaces in the United States are smoke-free, it may be difficult to imagine the influence that nicotine addiction once had on the politics of worker resistance, workplace management, occupational health, vice, moral reform, grassroots activism, and the labor movement.

The experiences, social relations, demands, and disputes that accompanied smoking in the workplace in turn shaped the histories of antismoking politics and tobacco control. The steady expansion of cigarette smoking among men, women, and children during the first half of the twentieth century brought working people into sustained conflict with managers' demands for diligent attention to labor processes and work rules.

Addiction to nicotine led smokers to resist and challenge policies that coldly stood between them and the cigarettes they craved. Wood argues that workers' varying abilities to smoke on the job stemmed from the success or failure of sustained opposition to employer policies that restricted or banned smoking.

During World War II, workers in defense industries, for example, struck against workplace smoking bans. By the 1970s, opponents of smoking in workplaces began to organize, and changing medical knowledge and dwindling union power contributed further to the downfall of workplace smoking. The demise of the ability to smoke on the job over the past four decades serves as an important indicator of how the power of workers' influence in labor-management relations has dwindled over the same period

Focusing on the plantation regions of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, Greta de Jong analyzes how social justice activists responded to mass unemployment by lobbying political leaders, initiating anti-poverty projects, and forming cooperative enterprises that fostered economic and political autonomy, efforts that encountered strong opposition from free market proponents who opposed government action

An exchange of letters between Bernice Wimsof Bossier City, Louisiana, and U.S. Assistant Attorney General O. John Rogge regarding the murder of Frank Hanes by his employer, Mississippi plantation owner Tom Alexander. Atyped transcription of Wims’first handwritten letter follows at the end of the three letters in this exchangeof letter LAWCHA: Teaching Labor’s Story. Document 8.5SourceSelection and Teaching Guide byGreta de Jong, Foundation Professorof History, University of Nevada, Reno

"The second edition of the authoritative text on the Elaine Massacre which took place in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919. With contributions by fellow historians Brian K. Mitchell and Guy Lancaster, this second edition of Blood in Their Eyes draws from recently discovered sources to explore in greater detail the actions of the mob and the lives of those who survived the massacre.

About

On September 30, 1919, local law enforcement in rural Phillips County, Arkansas, attacked black sharecroppers at a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. The next day, hundreds of white men from the Delta, along with US Army troops, converged on the area “with blood in their eyes.” What happened next was one of the deadliest incidents of racial violence in the history of the United States, leaving a legacy of trauma and silence that has persisted for more than a century. In the wake of the massacre, the NAACP and Little Rock lawyer Scipio Jones spearheaded legal action that revolutionized due process in America.

The first edition of Grif Stockley’s Blood in Their Eyes, published in 2001, brought renewed attention to the Elaine Massacre and sparked valuable new studies on racial violence and exploitation in Arkansas and beyond. With contributions from fellow historians Brian K. Mitchell and Guy Lancaster, this revised edition draws from recently uncovered source material and explores in greater detail the actions of the mob, the lives of those who survived the massacre, and the regime of fear and terror that prevailed under Jim Crow.


Grif Stockley is an award-winning novelist and historian whose many books include Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas and Black Boys Burning: The 1959 Fire at the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School.

Brian K. Mitchell is assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He has researched and published on the Elaine Massacre, the 1859 expulsion of free blacks from Arkansas, and urban renewal in Little Rock.

Guy Lancaster has written or edited three previous works on racial violence in Arkansas, including Bullets and Fire: Lynching and Authority in Arkansas, 1840–1950. He serves as editor of the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System.
Reviews

“The original edition of Blood in Their Eyes, published in 2001, has been the definitive study of the Elaine Massacre. Grif Stockley conducted painstaking, thorough research into the massacre and its aftermath, including interviews with persons whose ancestors were involved in those events. He did a remarkable job of providing narrative and analysis of a tragic, ugly episode that local whites tried hard to sweep under the rug. This updated edition, intended to more or less coincide with the centennial of the Elaine Massacre, draws upon some new sources that have been published (or, in some cases, discovered) since 2001 and also incorporates fresh research done by coauthors Brian K. Mitchell and Guy Lancaster, who did not contribute to the original edition. The updated edition largely sticks to the narrative of the original while providing significant new information, such as a greater investigation into the role of the U.S. military in the Elaine Massacre and the roles that some whites played in getting the ‘Elaine Twelve’ released from death row and in protecting Robert Hill, who fled to Kansas, from being extradited back to Arkansas. … Opening the eyes of some Arkansans and other Americans to the too often overlooked history of racial atrocities in the state and nation might seem more important now than it has in a long time.”
—Matthew Hild, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Spring 2021
Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction to the Revised Edition
Introduction to the First Edition
Chronology of Events

Chapter 1 – Charles Hillman Brough’s Midnight Train Ride
Chapter 2 – The Law of the Delta
Chapter 3 – The Boys from Camp Pike
Chapter 4 – A Committee of Seven
Chapter 5 – More Than One Version
Chapter 6 – Little Rock and New York
Chapter 7 – The Trials Begin
Chapter 8 – Colonel Murphy for the Defense
Chapter 9 – The Retrials of the Ware Defendants
Chapter 10 – The Changing of the Guard
Chapter 11 – Affidavits from Unlikely Sources
Chapter 12 – Moore v. Dempsey
Chapter 13 – Scipio Jones Takes Charge
Conclusion – On the Larger Meaning of Elaine

Appendix I
Appendix II

The earlier paintings depict forms household labor, including in the farm fields. Later images show tradespeople engaged in their craft, such as the blacksmith, chemist, cobbler, cork maker, glass blower, and taxidermist. This includes a unique collection of approximately thirty 17th century medical paintings depicting the primitive beginning of early medical treatments. More recent works are images of machines and men embodying the paradoxes of industrialism of the mid-18th century to post-World War II. These works, often commissioned by the factory’s owner, are views of steel mills and foundries surrounded by hefty train tracks or dark factory interiors where glowing molten metal is juxtaposed with factory workers and managers.Most pieces in the collection are by German and Dutch artists, however, there are also representations from American, Austrian, Belgian, Bohemian, Danish, Dutch, English, Hungarian, Flemish, French, and Spanish artists alike.

What can we learn from GTMO’s past? What should we remember about what’s happening now? Hear from those who were there. The Guantánamo Public Memory Project seeks to build public awareness of the long history of the US naval station at Guantánamo, Bay, Cuba, and foster dialogue on the future of this place and the policies it shapes. It includes a focus on workers at GTMO. Who's made GTMO work?
National Dialogue & Traveling Exhibit

The Project’s first traveling exhibit opened in New York City at NYU’s Kimmel Center for University Life Windows Gallery on December 13, 2012 and has since traveled to over 20 sites across the country and internationally. The exhibit explores GTMO’s history from US occupation in 1898 to today’s debates and visions for its future. It was created through a unique collaboration among nearly two dozen universities from around the country by student curators, communities, and people with first-hand experience at GTMO, who raised difficult questions and addressed them from diverse perspectives. The exhibit is accompanied by public dialogues in each host community and is currently available.

"The history of whiteness, victimhood, and human trafficking in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds
Fantasies of white slavery and the narratives of victimhood they spawn form the foundation of racist ideology. They also obscure the lived experience of trafficked servants and sailors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gunther Peck moves deftly between the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds to discover where and when people with light skin color came to see themselves as white. Separating fact from fiction, and paying close attention to the ideological work each performs, Peck shows how laboring women and men leveraged their newfound whiteness to secure economic opportunity and political power.

Peck argues that whiteness emerged not as a claim of racial superiority but as a byproduct of wide-ranging and rancorous public debate over trafficking and enslavement. Even as whiteness became a legal category that signaled privilege, trafficking and race remained tightly interwoven. Those advocating for the value of whiteness invoked emotionally freighted victimhood, claiming that so-called white slavery was a crime whose costs far exceeded those associated with the enslavement of African peoples across the Americas. Peck helps us understand the chilling history that produced the racist ideology that still poisons our politics in the present day." -from the publisher

One of the most infamous villains in North America during the Progressive Era was the padrone, a mafia-like immigrant boss who allegedly enslaved his compatriots. In this history of the padrone, first published in 2000, Gunther Peck argues that they were not primitive men but rather thoroughly modern entrepreneurs.

Why have American politics developed differently from politics in Europe? In this innovative and insightful book, Gwendolyn Mink approaches this question from a new angle: she asks what determined union labor's political interests and how those interests influenced the political role forged by the American Federation of Labor.Why have American politics developed differently from politics in Europe? Generations of scholars and commentators have wondered why organized labor in the United States did not acquire a broad-based constituency or form an autonomous labor party. In this innovative and insightful book,

Gwendolyn Mink finds new answers by approaching this question from a different angle: she asks what determined union labor's political interests and how those interests influenced the political role forged by the American Federation of Labor. At bottom, Mink argues, the demographic dynamics of industrialization produced a profound racial response to economic change among organized labor. This response shaped the AFL's political strategy and political choices.In her account of the unique role played by labor in politics prior to the New Deal, Mink focuses on the ways in which the organizational and political interests of the AFL were mediated by the national issue of immigration and links the AFL's response to immigration to its conservative stance in and toward politics. She investigates the political impact of a labor market split between union and nonunion, old and new immigrant workers; of dramatic demographic change; and of nativism and racism. Mink then elucidates the development of trade-union political interests, ideology, and strategy; the movement of the AFL into established state and party structures; and the consequent separation of the AFL from labor's social base

In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands.” In this poem, Kipling urged the U.S. to take up the “burden” of empire, as had Britain and other European nations. Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become vice-president and then president, described it as “rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view.” Not everyone was as favorably impressed as Roosevelt. African Americans, among many others, objected to the notion of the “white man’s burden.” Among the dozens of replies to Kipling’s poem was “The Black Man’s Burden,” written by African-American clergyman and editor H. T. Johnson and published in April 1899. A “Black Man’s Burden Association” was even organized with the goal of demonstrating that mistreatment of brown people in the Philippines was an extension of the mistreatment of black Americans at home.

The Bethlehem Steel Corporation was a holding company formed in 1904 to control the older Bethlehem Steel Company and a number of shipyards nationwide. At the turn of the century, under the direction of Charles M. Schwab (1862-1939) and Eugene Grace (1876-1960), the corporation became the second largest American steel company. Combined with its other venture, Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corp., it became a leading twentieth century American business.

This digital collection contains materials from multiple physical collections: Bethlehem Steel Company color transparencies and slides (Accession 1992.250), the Bethlehem Steel Corporation and Bethlehem Ship Corporation photographs (Accession 1980.300), and the Bethlehem Steel Corporation records (Accession 1699) collection. These collections have not been digitized in their entirety.

The results for the search term automation in the digitized collections of Hagley library-over 1000 items, which can be limited in a sidebar. Films, prescriptions, publicity, propaganda, oral history, catalogs, advertisements, internal newsletters, speeches

Hagley's library furthers the study of business and technology in America. The collections include individuals' papers and companies' records ranging from eighteenth-century merchants to modern telecommunications and illustrate the impact of the business system on society. Placing the word labor in the search bar results in over 8000 results, all of which can be filtered by media, such as film, text, etc.

800 items digitized that related to Molly Maguires and Pinkerton

This digital collection includes a selection of posters, largely from the first half of the twentieth century. This online collection is sourced from a variety of accessions and items Hagley Library's collections. Posters in this collection include material from Hagley Library's Mather & Company workplace posters (Accession 1994.319), Seagram Company World War II posters (Accession 2004.214), Seagram Company World War II posters (Accession 2004.248), Women at work World War II posters (Accession 1994.236), World War II posters (Accession 1995.211), and other collections, as well as individually accessioned materials.

Many of the posters here are employee motivational posters printed by Mather & Company and focus on personal work ethic and behavior. Others include defense industry posters created during World War I and World War II by organizations like the United States Department of Labor, National Industrial Conservation Movement, and DuPont. Largely addressed to American workers, the posters encourage continued production in support of the war effort.

"The thesis is simple: Inequality is America's biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix this problem. But the labor movement of today has failed to enable enough individuals to join unions. Thus, organized labor's powerful potential is being wielded incompetently. And what is happening inside of organized labor will--far more than most people realize--determine the economic and social course of American life for years to come. In deeply reported chapters that span the country, Nolan shows readers how organized labor can and does wield power effectively--in spots--but also why it has long been unable to build itself into the powerful institution that the working class needs. These narratives both inspire by example and motivate by counter-example. Whether it's a union that has succeeded in a single city, and is trying to scale that effectiveness nationally, or the ins and outs of a historically large and transformative union campaign, or the human face of a strike, or a profile of the most anti-union state in America, Nolan highlights the actual mechanisms that connect labor to politics to real change. Throughout, Nolan follows Sara Nelson, the powerful and charismatic head of the flight attendants' union, as she struggles with how (and whether) to assert herself as a national leader of the labor movement, to try to fix what is broken about it. The Hammer draws the line from forgotten workplaces to Washington's halls of power, and shows how labor can utterly transform American politics--if it can first transform itself. Nolan is an expert who has covered labor and politics for more than a decade, and has helped to unionize his own industry. The time has come for his poignant and enlightening book as we prepare for the historic 2024 presidential election. The Hammer is a unique on-the-ground excavation of the present and the future of the labor movement. It is the story of what the labor movement can be, and why it isn't that...yet.

Aphra Behn published Oroonoko in 1688, a time when the Atlantic slave trade and African slavery in the Americas were becoming consolidated as a transnational, economic system. The novel draws on popular forms of literature such as the aristocratic romance, the travel narrative, and social criticism. It suggests some of the ways that English people were beginning to think about racial and cultural difference and about their own role in colonization and the slave trade. The documents that follow develop the context for Behn’s narrative and, more broadly, demonstrate how European writing on race, slavery, and colonialism evolved over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Is the United States “a nation of immigrants,” a “land of opportunity,” and refuge for the world’s persecuted and poor? Is the country made stronger by its ability to welcome and absorb people from around the world? Or are the new arrivals a burden? Should the United States close its borders to immigrants because of their numbers, their countries of origin, their politics, religions, financial means, educational levels, or medical conditions—all of which have been factors in one or more immigration laws over the past 150 years? What does it mean to be an immigrant, to be born in one country and spend much of one’s life in another? What consequences does immigration have for the individuals, families, and communities who migrate?

Teachers and students can explore the social and political context for Sinclair’s novel through several Newberry Digital Collections for the Classroom, including, "Chicago Workers during the Long Gilded Age," "Immigration and Citizenship in the United States," and "Subversives in the City: Political Radicalism in Chicago." The collection of documents below focuses on neighborhood and community life for workers such as the ones Sinclair portrays in The Jungle. Back of the Yards and other working-class neighborhoods drew considerable attention from sociologists and reformers at the turn of the century. They used maps, tables, and photographs to document conditions in the neighborhoods, and they became directly involved in efforts to improve the workers’ quality of life. Often they saw real change: according to most reports, living conditions in Back of the Yards had improved significantly by the end of World War I.

What were working conditions like in Chicago during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? What efforts did workers make to change these conditions? How did industries—and the public—respond to their demands? This is a document set with contextual information and guided reading/questions. It uses images and sections of familiar readings from this era.

"To celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 1964, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America sponsored The Inheritance, a documentary on US labor history. The
film was an anomaly among contemporary union films. It conveyed the Cold War liberal and business unionist message that trade unions had become mainstays of capitalism,
seeking advancement within the system. But the film—produced, directed, and written by political leftists and progressives—also retained a social-unionist vision, linking together
earlier battles for industrial and social democracy with the ongoing civil rights struggle. It remains a frequently viewed and discussed documentary a half century after its release". --Nathan Godfried

It "conveyed a history of modern America through the eyes of its working people and pointed to the important role of the Amalgamated and other unions in the nation’s economic and social development. Through still photographs, newsreels, first-hand accounts, and folk music, the film followed immigrant workers and their descendants from Ellis Island to crowded city slums to sweatshops to picket lines and union halls. Like With These Hands, The Inheritance emphasized how unions built labor-capital peace while advancing the economic and social interests of their rank and file. Unlike the ILGWU film, however, the ACWA documentary positively referred to the militant class consciousness that had characterized the social unionism of the 1930s and 1940s and linked that militancy to the African American civil rights struggle of the early 1960s" -_Nathan Godfried

Harry A. Franck's 1913 Zone 88 Policeman. The book primarily details Franck's experiences as a police officer tasked with controlling workers in the Panama Canal Zone.


Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/zonepoliceman88c00franrich

This widely acclaimed work, first published in 1974, overturned the reigning ideologies of academic sociology and became the standard text for many basic areas of sociological inquiry, including the science of managerial control, the relationship of technological innovation to social class, and the eradication of skill from work under capitalism.

A new foreword by John Bellamy Foster sets the work in historical and theoretical context. Also included are two rare articles by Braverman that add much to our understanding of the book: “The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century” (1975) and “Two Comments” (1976).

Labor and Monopoly Capital is one of the most influential books of our time, and it deserves to be. This new edition will help a new generation of readers understand the forces that are now transforming work around the world—David Montgomery

Written with great force and beauty.—Robert Heilbroner, New York Review of Books

The best analysis of the division of labor between the design and the execution of industrial production.

—Christopher Lasch, New York Times Book Review

The Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies supports students and faculty at the University of Washington in the study of labor in all of its facets. Through education and research, our mission is to develop labor studies - broadly conceived to include working people everywhere - as a central concern in higher education. We cultivate connections with labor communities locally and around the world, and inform policymakers about issues confronting workers.

Labor Studies is interdisciplinary. Understanding how and why work is performed, organized and divided in societies necessitates multiple scholarly perspectives. It demands recognition that labor occurs everywhere under many conditions - at home, in the workplace, waged and unwaged, organized and unorganized. Conceiving labor studies broadly also demands that we conceive labor movements broadly - to encompass struggles against oppression and hierarchy based on race, gender, sexuality, citizenship status, nationality, ability and more, in their particularities and their many intersections.

As a newspaperman for nearly three decades, Read worked as a reporter, an editor, and a local union activist. After working as a reporter for four years, Read became the editor of the Chicago American in 1926 during some of the most intense crime in Chicago and United States history. Read carried on the tradition of aggressive newsgathering by the Chicago American by forming a relationship with Al Capone, one of the most notorious gangsters in Chicago and the country at the time. In 1945, Read and his wife moved to Washington, D.C., when he accepted a job as Assistant to the Secretary-Treasurer of the CIO, James B. Carey. In addition to his work with Catholic organizations, he also became more active on health and safety committees in Washington, D.C.