Labor History Links

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed freedom for Americans from the domination of Great Britain, yet for millions of African Americas caught up in a brutal system of racially based slavery, freedom would be denied for ninety additional years until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Freedom's Delay: America's Struggle for Emancipation, 1776-1865 probes the slow, painful, yet ultimately successful crusade to end slavery throughout the nation, North and South. This work fills an important gap in the literature of slavery's demise. Unlike other authors who focus largely on specific time periods or regional areas, Allen Carden presents a thematically structured national synthesis of emancipation.

Freedom's Delay offers a comprehensive and unique overview of the process of manumission commencing in 1776 when slavery was a national institution, not just the southern experience known historically by most Americans. In this volume, the entire country is examined, and major emancipatory efforts - political, literary, legal, moral, and social - made by black and white, free and enslaved individuals are documented over the years from independence through the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Freedom's Delay dispels many of the myths about slavery and abolition, including that racial servitude was of little consequence in the North, and, where it did exist, it ended quickly and easily; that abolition was a white man's cause and blacks were passive recipients of liberty; that the South seceded primarily to protect states' rights, not slavery; and that the North fought the Civil War primarily to end the subjugation of African Americans. By putting these misunderstandings aside, this book reveals what actually transpired in the fight for human rights during this critical era. Carden's inclusion of a cogent preface and epilogue assures that Freedom's Delay will find a significant place in the literature of American slavery and freedom. With a compelling preface and epilogue, notes, illustrations and tables, and a detailed bibliography, this volume will be of great value not only in courses on American history and African American history but also to the general reading public.

In the late twentieth century United States, nothing united union members, Chicanos, gay men and lesbians, feminists, black activists, and progressive college students quite so well as Coors beer. Members of these communities came together not in praise of the ice cold beverage but, rather, to unite against a common enemy: the Colorado-based Coors Brewing Company.

Wielding the consumer boycott as their weapon of choice, activists targeted Coors for allegations of antiunionism, discrimination, and ties to prominent political conservatives. Over multiple decades of organizing and coalition-building, anti-Coors activists molded the boycott tool into a means of political protest.

In Brewing a Boycott, Allyson P. Brantley details the history of this boycott movement - one of the longest such campaigns in U.S. history - for the first time. Drawing from an array of archival collections, as well as oral history interviews with long-time boycotters, Brantley offers a compelling, grassroots view of boycotting, anti-corporate organizing, and the unlikely coalitions that formed in opposition to the iconic Rocky Mountain brew. The story of this boycott, as told here, highlights the vibrancy of activism in the final decades of the twentieth century and the enduring legacy of that organizing for communities, consumer activists, and corporations today"-- Provided by publisher

a. Official journal of: Machine Woodworkers' International Union of America, 1895; Amalgamated Woodworkers' International Union of America, 1896-<1908>

Journal of the Amalgamated Woodworker International Union of America, AFL, published in Chicago, Illinois, a few issues https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011483258 Official journal of: Machine Woodworkers' International Union of America, 1895; Amalgamated Woodworkers' International Union of America, 1896-<1908>t organized workers in the timber, milling, and furniture manufacturing industries

At the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. In Between Slavery and Capitalism, Martin Ruef examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as blacks and whites alike learned to navigate the shoals between two different economic worlds. Analyzing trajectories among average Southerners, this is perhaps the most extensive sociological treatment of the transition from slavery since W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America. In the aftermath of the Civil War, uncertainty was a pervasive feature of life in the South, affecting the economic behavior and social status of former slaves, Freedmen's Bureau agents, planters, merchants, and politicians, among others. Emancipation brought fundamental questions: How should emancipated slaves be reimbursed in wage contracts? What occupations and class positions would be open to blacks and whites? What forms of agricultural tenure could persist? And what paths to economic growth would be viable? To understand the escalating uncertainty of the postbellum era, Ruef draws on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including several thousand interviews with former slaves, letters, labor contracts, memoirs, survey responses, census records, and credit reports. Through a resolutely comparative approach, Between Slavery and Capitalism identifies profound changes between the economic institutions of the Old and New South and sheds new light on how the legacy of emancipation continues to affect political discourse and race and class relations today.

Official Journal of the American Federation of Labor. Published after 1882, but this includes only those from 1894 onward. After 1955 it becomes AFL-CIO Federationist Editors: 1894-Jan. 1895, S. Gompers.--Feb. 1895-Jan. 1896, J. McBride.--Feb. 1896-1924, S. Gompers.--Jan. 1925- W. Green.
Issued 1894-1955 by the American Federation of Labor; Jan. 1956- by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.
Official magazine of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations.

In this autobiographical sketch published in 1903 in the Independent magazine (which ran a series of about eighty short autobiographical “lifelets” of “undistinguished Americans” between 1902 and 1906), Chinese immigrant Lee Chew looked back on his passage to America, and his years as a launderer and merchant on both the East and West coasts.

"Faced with stiff business opposition, a conservative political climate, hostile courts, and declining membership, leaders of the American Federeration of Labor (AFL) grew increasingly cautious during the 1920s. Labor radicals viewed AFL leaders as overpaid, self-interested functionaries uninterested in organizing unorganized workers into unions. A cartoon by William Gropper published in the Communist Yiddish newspaper Freiheit (and reprinted in English in the New Masses) caricatures delegates to a 1926 AFL convention in Atlantic City. 'Well, boys,' the caption reads, 'We had a swell convention. Now for the gravy.'"

The San Francisco Building Trades Council (BTC), which Patrick McCarthy helped organize in 1898, actively participated in the anti-Asian agitation that characterized California politics, particularly labor politics, in the late-19th century. The BTC, like the national American Federation of Labor (AFL), argued that the very presence of Chinese (and, after 1900, Japanese and Korean immigrants as well) dragged down the living standards of white workers. This memorial from a 1901 Chinese exclusion convention in San Francisco devoted to strategies for preventing Chinese immigration, called on Congress to use its legislative powers to limit the arrival of Asian aliens to America. It was reprinted in a 1902 AFL pamphlet.

The San Francisco Building Trades Council (BTC), organized in 1898, actively participated in the anti-Asian agitation that characterized California politics, particularly labor politics, in the late-19th century. The BTC, like the national American Federation of Labor (AFL), argued that the very presence of Chinese (and, after 1900, Japanese and Korean immigrants as well) dragged down the living standards of white workers. The following excerpt is from a 1902 AFL pamphlet entitled Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat vs. Rice, which called for a second extension of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Despite the pamphlet’s disclaimer that it was not prejudiced, arguments were riddled with racist statements about the employment history and “Social Habits” of “John Chinaman.” The selections from the pamphlet reprinted here reflected the abiding beliefs of many white workers, especially skilled workers who belonged to the San Francisco BTC.

You must enter the words Chinese Immigrants at the landing page to find this module. The following module on Chinese immigrants is US history survey classes. The materials consist of an illustrated introduction, excerpts from four contemporaneous articles, an online quiz (not included in these materials), and an assignment for an e-mail discussion. The introduction describes not only the life of the immigrants in the United States but their economic and cultural background in China. The goal is to expand the students’ knowledge to include the China from which these immigrants came. Two of the articles oppose Chinese immigrants; two praise them. They are designed to let students see the varying perceptions of the immigrants, the arguments for and against Chinese immigration, and the complex class and ethnic dimensions of this controversy."

Filmed in secret in Hollywood amidst the Great Depression. The drama of one of America's "forgotten men" and his conversion to the cause of trade unionism.Hunger forces a young man to cross a picket line. Later, his experiences lead him to recognize his common interests with the strikers and he is converted to the union. See https://wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/2017/10/27/millions_of_us_1935/ for more information.

The American Labor Studies Center is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization whose mission is to collect, analyze, evaluate, create and disseminate labor history and labor studies curricula and related materials, aligned to the various state and national standards, to kindergarten through 12th grade teachers nationwide. They will include such areas as the history, organization, activities, and issues affecting the labor movement and the political, economic, and cultural aspects of workers and their unions. It is governed by a Board of Directors and funded by contributions and government grants.

The ALSC owns and is restoring the Kate Mullany House at 350 Eighth Street in Troy, New York. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998 by the Secretary of the Interior. It was dedicated by the First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton on July 15, 1998. The home was designated a National Historic Site by an act of Congress in 2004. Of the 91 National Historic Sites, it is the only one to combine a focus on labor, women’s and immigrant history. It is located at 350 Eighth Street in Troy, New York.

Kate Mullany, a young Irish immigrant, and daughter of a widowed mother became the leader of the first all-female union in the nation and the first woman to hold office in a national union. At the age of 24, Mullany organized 200 women and became the president of the Troy Collar Laundry Workers Union. In February 1864, the collar workers went on a successful strike demanding a 25 percent increase in wages and safer working conditions. In 1868, she became assistant secretary of the National Labor Union under William Sylvis.

In its first issue, the American Mechanic and Home Journal, published in Norwich, Connecticut, by Ayer & Co., proclaimed itself “Bound to Advocate the Cause of the Working Class.” In the salutatory, “To the Public,” the Journal‘s editor committed the newspaper to promoting the “general interests of the mechanic and the laborer,” including the ten-hour system. “We wish to see [the ten-hour workday] established in every factory and workshop throughout the country,” he wrote. The editor went on to say: “The custom of compelling operatives to work thirteen or fourteen hours a day in the confined atmosphere of a factory is injurious to health and morals.” The Journal was skeptical of the major political parties and urged mechanics to support “the independent course in favor of the working classes and the cause of Labor Reform.”

While news and commentary from national and foreign papers was reprinted frequently, educational pieces marked as “original” to the Journal appeared as well. One such piece gave instruction on the cultivation of fruit trees. Another introduced mechanics to basic ideas about chemistry. Advertisements from trades people included those from masons; tin plate, copper, and sheet metal workers; potters; carpenters; and coach makers. Dealers of fish, meat, gravestones, and other everyday goods also placed display ads in the paper. A single issue of the American Mechanic and Home Journal cost 4 cents, and a subscription cost $1.50 a year.

discussion questions for film https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1533113/mediaviewer/rm2383901952/?ref_=tt_ov_i about the struggle for a union at Kannopolis factory in North Carolina

An ASHP collection of 11 videos on various themes in U.S. history, including the Tea Party, slavery, emancipation, working women, ethnic and migration histories, poverty, and more.

In this activity, students watch a short clip from the ASHP documentary 1877: The Grand Army of Starvation to learn about the impact of railroad expansion on Americans and the nation as a whole. After watching the clip, students complete the “Technological Turning Points and their Impact” worksheet in order to examine the positive and negative effects of the railroad. Objectives

Students will be able to describe the impact of the railroad on the United States, including which people benefitted from it and which did not.

Students will evaluate how and why the completion of the transcontinental railroad is considered a major turning point.

Students will be able to analyze the reasons why railroad workers decided to go on strike in 1877.

A nationwide rebellion brought the United States to a standstill in the summer of 1877. Eighty thousand railroad workers walked out, joined by hundreds of thousands of Americans outraged by the excesses of the railroad companies and the misery of a four-year economic depression. Police, state militia, and federal troops clashed with strikers and sympathizers, leaving more than one hundred dead and thousands injured. The Great Uprising inaugurated a new era of conflict over the meaning of America in the industrial age.
Lesson plans and activities as well as transcription is at https://ashp.cuny.edu/documentaries-list/1877-the-grand-army-of-starvation/

This collection holds over 80 items that deal with labor activism from 1877-1975

The collected documents and the secondary reading primarily focus on the experiences of ordinary Americans as they wrestled with the consequences of government policies and employment practices that shaped or limited their economic opportunities. Letters, photographs, political cartoons, oral testimony, speeches and government documents convey the difficulties experienced by the working poor and others who confronted a myriad of often-insurmountable challenges to pay household expenses with inadequate wages. Along with other documents in SHEC, these materials also provide glimpses into the efforts of activists and common people to use both official avenues and collective struggle to expand economic equality and to enact changes that would bring the "American Dream" into closer reach.

The collection is designed to encourage students to consider these essential questions:
What conditions contribute to the economic hardship experienced by Americans, past and present?
How are economic opportunities shaped by class, race, and gender?
What role does the government play in ameliorating or worsening poverty? In creating economic opportunities?
What solutions have ordinary Americans and elected officials proposed to lessen economic hardship and poverty?
What does it mean to "make it" in America?

Documents include:

Jourdon Anderson Responds to his Former Enslaver (1865)
A Sharecropper Explains Why He Joined the Exodusters (1879)
A Mill Worker Testifies about Unemployment (1883)
Lenora M. Barry Describes Women's Working Conditions in New Jersey (1887)
AFL Member Expresses Worry About Women in Industry (1897)
A Labor Leader Rails Against Chinese Immigration (1878)
Children Working in a Shrimp Cannery (1911)
Redlining in Miami (1934)
NAACP Representative Testifies before Congress about the Economic Security Act (1935)
Margaret Bourke-White Exposes Economic Disparities (1937)
Immigrants' Contributions to the Nation (1939)
A Cartoonist Comments on American Economic Priorities (1969)
"Whitey on the Moon" by Gil Scott-Heron (1970)
Reagan's Address about the Economy (1981)
A Peruvian Immigrant Recalls Working in Las Vegas Hotels and Casinos (2019)
Charting the Changing Wealth of Americans (2021)

Between 1900 and 1930, political turmoil in Mexico combined with the rise of agribusiness in the American Southwest to prompt a large-scale migration of Mexicans to the U.S. There were reasons on both sides of the border. Transformations in the Mexican economy under President Porfirio Díaz left many peasants landless and desperate; when he was overthrown in 1911, ten percent of Mexico's population departed for the U.S. There they found work in mining and agribusiness, which were transforming the economy of the Southwest from a region of small, entrepreneurial landholders into one dominated by large enterprises employing wage labor.

The documents in this collection explore the social, political, and economic dimensions of the first mass migration of Mexicans to the United States. Migrants found themselves in a strange position: desired as workers by large business concerns but facing intense legal, political, and social discrimination. The collection offers multiple perspectives on the phenomenon of Mexican migration, including the accounts of scholars, journalists, employers, and migrants themselves.
Includes:
Background Essay on Early Twentieth Century Mexican Immigration to the U.S.
Primary Sources
A Mexican Immigrant Expresses Ambivalence about Her New Life (1920s)
A Mexican Immigrant Describes Her Work in Los Angeles (1920s)
Mexican Refugees Flee to Texas (1914)
Graph of Mexican Immigration to the United States, 1900-1940
"The Americanese Wall, as Congressman Burnett Would Build It" (1916)
Soldiers Marching in Parade (1913)
Uncle Sam Chases Pancho Villa (1916)
Mexican and Japanese Laborers Form a Union (1903)
Employers Testify in Favor of Increased Mexican Immigration (1920)
A Professor Condemns Mexican Immigration (1912)
Mexican Immigrant Corridos (1930)
A Newspaper Urges Mexican Immigrants to Join a Mutual Aid Society (1904)
Race Relations in the U.S. Southwest in 1920s
A Mexican Migrant Reflects on His Experiences (1910s-1920s)

An unexpected friendship between two Italian and Jewish immigrant girls provides the backdrop for this story of labor organizing and women’s growing activism. While working in harsh sweatshops and factories, the young women also experienced the thrills of movies, amusement parks and dance halls. As their numbers in the workforce grew and working conditions declined they took matters into their own hands. In 1909, garment workers staged the “Uprising of the 20,000,” a massive strike that won union recognition and transformed the role of women in the union movement. (Length: 30 minutes) Chapter selection
Opening (0:29)
The Shirtwaist (2:42)
Putting on Style (5:38)
The Paycheck (8:39)
Work and Play (11:45)
The Strike (16:22)
The Arrest (21:49)
Download Video

Teaching Materials
Viewer’s Guide (.pdf)

See collection of related primary documents and teaching activities in HERB https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/exhibits/show/heaven-will-protect

During the mid-nineteenth century, well over a million Irish fled their native country for the United States. Those who settled in New York City overwhelmingly lived in the Five Points, a neighborhood that achieved international notoriety as an overcrowded, dangerous, and disease-ridden slum. But the Five Points was more than that. The immigrants who lived there provided the labor that fueled the city's emerging industrial order. They established a foothold in politics through Tammany Hall, the city's Democratic machine. And the Five Points boasted a vibrant culture that attracted New Yorkers from all parts of the city.

The materials and teaching activities in this collection will give you multiple perspectives on the Five Points and the people who lived there. The collection utilizes letters, censuses, and bank records, among many primary sources, to paint a picture of life in the Five Points. In addition, ASHP's documentary film Five Points: New York's Irish Working Class in the 1850s provides rich visual images of the neighborhood and puts students in the shoes of the Mulvahills, an ordinary working-class family who made its home in America's most famous slum.

This collection is designed to demonstrate the following historical understandings:

Thousands of Irish men and women fled the Great Potato Famine in the 1840s and 1850s and settled in urban communities in the U.S., including New York City's notorious slum, Five Points.

Five Points was afflicted by poverty, disease, and violence, but was also a working-class community where thousands of Irish, Germans, and African Americans worked, raised families, built churches, and established social and political institutions.

Because middle-class Protestants saw only corruption, vice, filth, extreme poverty, and intemperance in Five Points, they established missions to convert Irish Catholics, "improve" moral education, and ameliorate the conditions of the working poor.

The Irish were often depicted in mid-nineteenth century popular media using physical stereotypes that rationalized discrimination and were similar to racist caricatures of African Americans.
Documents and resources include primary sources listed below and an introductory essay
Map of the Five Points Neighborhood, 1855-67
Table of Emigrant Savings Bank Account Records (1850s)
Table of Marriage Records from the Church of the Transfiguration in New York City, 1855
Artifacts from Irish Tenements and Saloon in Five Points (1850s)
Statistics about Life in Five Points (1840s-1850s)
New York State Census Page of Five Points, 1855
A Member of the Ladies' Home Missionary Society Visits a Five Points Family (1854)
A Protestant Missionary Describes Sabbath in Five Points (1857)
A Letter to the Editor Attempts to Explain Crime in Five Points (1854)
An Irish Emigrant to New York Writes Home (1850)
An Irish Emigrant Writes to Relatives in County Donegal (1848)
A Nativist New Yorker Disparages Irish Arrivals (1830s-1850s)
An Illustrator Depicts Irish Ethnic Stereotypes (1866)
"The Irrepressible Conflict" (1862)
"The Voting-Place" (1858)
Five Points in 1859
A Five Points "Orphan" Is Taken In by Reverend Pease and the Five Points House of Industry in 1853

In this activity students compare an excerpt of a WPA interview with an ex-slave with a more famous statement by Frederick Douglass to arrive at their own interpretations of slave resistance. This lesson is designed to work with the film Doing As They Can, but parts of it can be completed without the film. Objectives include: comparing two statements by former slaves to identify and interpret acts of resistance, and having students create a journal entry from the perspective of a slave describing how they woudl respond to the conditions of enslavement.

In this activity students perform a role play of a talk show between Lowell workers and factory owners. To research their characters, students analyze primary sources. This activity is used to teach with the film Daughters of Free Men, but can be completed without the film.Objectives
Students will analyze how changing working conditions and decreasing pay led to strikes in the 1830s.
Students will dramatize the conflict between factory owners and factory workers over changing working conditions and pay.
Instructions
Step 1: Divide the group into four equal groups: one group to play the factory owner, one group to play a girl who wants to go on strike, one group to play a girl who does not want to go on strike, and one group to play the talk show host. Pass out copies of the To Strike or Not to Strike worksheet describing the situation and go over the parts of the role play carefully.
Step 2: Pass out copies of the character planning worksheets to every student, as well as the primary and secondary documents. In their character groups, students review the readings and select evidence and information they wish to include in the talk show role play. Students should consider the arguments and evidence the character would use, and how he/she would counter the arguments of the other characters. The talk show host groups should also plan for what kinds of questions they will ask the other characters.
Step 3: Each group should choose one member to perform the role play for the class. Pass out copies of the Scene Assessment Rubric to the non-performing members of the class and go over directions for completing it as they actively listen to the role play; as students watch the talk show, they should take notes about the main points of each character and the sources the actors used to create their dialogue.
The designated characters present the role play to the class.
Step 4: After concluding the role play, lead discussion of following points:
How did factory work benefit the girls? (got them off the farm, gave them autonomy, positive supervision of boardinghouses, own wages, education, cultural opportunities with other workers)
In what ways was factory work not a benefit to the girls? (wage cuts, boardinghouse rent raises, strict schedule and rules, loss of independence--being "a slave", danger/discomfort of factory work)

Historical Context
A group of Boston capitalists built a major textile manufacturing center in Lowell, Massachusetts beginning in the 1820s. The first factories recruited women from rural New England as their labor force. These young women, far from home, lived in rows of boardinghouses adjacent to the growing number of mills. The industrial production of textiles was highly profitable, and the number of factories in Lowell and other mill towns increased. More mils, however, led to overproduction, which led to a drop in prices and profits. Mill owners reduced wages and speeded up the pace of work. They also raised the rent for their boardinghouses. The young female operates organized to protest these wage cuts in 1834 and 1836. Materials for this Activity
A Former Lowell Girl Remembers Working in the Mills (with text supports)
Regulations of the Middlesex Company and Its Boarding Houses (with text supports)
Young Women Ask Permission to Work in Lowell (with text supports)
A Former Mill Girl Remembers the Lowell Strike of 1836 (with text supports)
Time Table of the Lowell Mills
Daughters of Free Men Script Excerpts (with text supports)
To Strike or Not to Strike worksheets