Labor History Links

Olaudah Equiano (c.1745-1797) was an eighteenth-century African writer, antislavery activist, mariner, explorer, and Britain's first black civil servant.

According to his famous autobiography, written in 1789, Equiano was born in what is now Nigeria. Kidnapped and sold into slavery in childhood, he was taken as a slave to the New World. As a slave to a captain in the Royal Navy, and later to a Quaker merchant, he eventually earned the price of his own freedom by careful trading and saving. As a seaman, he travelled the world, including the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Atlantic, and the Arctic, the latter in an abortive attempt to reach the North Pole.

Coming to London, he became involved in the movement to abolish the slave trade, an involvement which led him to be employed as Britain's first black civil servant and, later, to him writing and publishing The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789) a strongly abolitionist autobiography. The book became a bestseller and, as well as furthering the anti-slavery cause, made Equiano a wealthy man. He married Susanna Cullen of Soham in Cambridgeshire in 1792, but died in London in March 1797.

These web pages aim to reflect the best in Equiano scholarship. Click on the links to find out more, and return to this site soon, as information is regularly updated.

In one of the largest forced migrations in human history, up to 12 million Africans were sold as slaves to Europeans and shipped to the Americas. Most slaves were seized inland and marched to coastal forts, where they were chained below deck in ships for the journey across the Atlantic or “Middle Passage,” under conditions designed to ship the largest number of people in the smallest space possible. Olaudah Equiano had been kidnapped from his family when he was 11 years old, carried off first to Barbados and then Virginia. After serving in the British navy, he was sold to a Quaker merchant from whom he purchased his freedom in 1766. His pioneering narrative of the journey from slavery to freedom, a bestseller first published in London in 1789, builds upon the traditions of spiritual narratives and travel literature to help create the slave narrative genre.

Established in 1938, the Old Slave Mart Museum is Charleston’s oldest museum of African American history and the first museum on the history of slavery in the United States. Located in the heart of downtown Charleston, the museum is housed in a portion of the city’s last major slave market. Today, the Old Slave Mart Museum is owned and operated by the City of Charleston and is dedicated to sharing the story of the domestic slave trade.

Ryan’s Mart was a four-building complex that stretched from Chalmers Street to Queen Street. The Old Slave Mart Museum is housed in the Mart’s last remaining structure, which served as a salesroom and showroom. During its years of operation, Ryan’s Mart also included a kitchen, an infirmary, a four-story jail where enslaved people were confined prior to sale, and a large enclosed lot used as a slave pen.

After the Civil War, former property that made up the Mart was broken up and served a variety of roles, including as tenement housing for local African Americans. In 1938, Miriam B. Wilson opened the Old Slave Mart Museum in the former salesroom building at Chalmers. Privately owned for its first fifty years, the museum was acquired in 1988 by the City of Charleston, who renovated and reopened it in 2007.

Economic and political uncertainty has brought the language of class – especially discussion of the working class – to a broad audience across scholarship and social debate. This introductory volume shows how the history of the working class has, is, and can be researched, written, and represented.
The book is structured in three parts: perspective, context, and application. Each offers an introduction to both classic historiography and new ideas and methodologies. With chapters covering a span of the years c.1750–present, the book focuses on three essential questions: What is working-class history and what should it become? What can a focus on working-class history reveal? What are the possibilities of this research in the university classroom, the heritage world, and beyond? Doing Working-Class History will appeal to students and scholars of working-class history, whether relative newcomers to the field or veteran researchers interested in new approaches and material. It will also be of interest to local and family historians, museum and heritage professionals, and general readers.
Introduction: A Time for Working-Class Histories
Oliver Betts, Laura Harrison, and Laura Christine Price
Part 1: Working-class History in Perspective
1. Disability in Working Class History
Ben Curtis
2. Parasites Unite: Sensory History, the Possibilities of Transgression, and the Perceptual Manifesto of the Proletariat Andrew Kettler
3. ‘What are those ones with the hammers?’: Teaching Working-class History in Secondary Schools Laura Christine Price
4. ‘Everyone has a tale to tell’: Family History, Family Historians, and Working-class Histories Laura Harrison
5. Museums and Heritage Sites as Sources for Working-class History Oliver Betts
6. Reading against the Grain: Non-plebian Sources in Working-class History Oliver Betts
7. Accessible Bibliography Laura Christine Price

Part 2: Working-class History in Context
8. The Daily Citizen: Class v consumerism in the Early Labour Press Christopher Shoop-Worrall
9. Gender Politics of Class: Exploring the Connections and Collaboration between the Irish Labour Movement and the Irish Women’s Franchise League in Dublin, 1908–1916 Erin Geraghty
10. Bootstraps and Bras: Maidenform, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, and the Creation of a New Export-Led Economy in Puerto Rico Natasha Synycia
11. Patriotism and the English Working Class, c. 1902–1929 David Swift
12. Medical Care for Working-class Children in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Claire Phillips
13. ‘I have told her that it was neglected, and asked her why’: Working–class Women and Discourses of ‘Bad Motherhood’ in England and Wales, 1870–1939 Daniel J.R. Grey
14. Unorganised Workers: Wool Textile Workers and Class Identities in Twentieth-century Yorkshire Laura Christine Price
15. ‘Where the Brass Band is Beloved’, Brass Bands and Working-class Cultural Identity: Inventing a Musical Metonym in the Southern Pennines, c.1840–1914 Stephen Etheridge
16. Street Life: The Leisure Spaces and Places of Working-class Youth in Britain, c. 1870–1960 Laura Harrison
17. Coal Miners in the Industrialisation and Deindustrialisation of France and Germany: A Comparative Synthesis of the Nord/Pas-de-Calais and the Ruhr Brian Shaev
Part 3: Working-class History in Application
18. Representations of Working-class Lives at Criminal Justice Heritage Sites Dan Johnson and Rose Wallis
19. How Broadside Ballads Followed Us into This Century Jennifer Reid
20. ‘We tell our own stories’: Bussing Out, a Creative Installation about Working-class Children in Bradford Shabina Aslam
21. ‘The Past We Inherit, the Future We Build’: The Praxis of Working-class History Rhian E. Jones

Seattle General Strike Lesson Plan that asks students to write an editorial. Desinged for 11th grade
National Standard
Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930) / Standards 1 and 3
Standard 1: How Progressives and others addressed problems of industrial capitalism, urbanization, and political
corruption
Standard 3: How the United States changed from the end of World War I to the eve of the Great Depression

from soup kitchen to battles with police

In collaboration with the National Park Service and the City of Richmond, the Oral History Center conducted over 250 interviews focusing on the World War II Home Front experience. Starting with over one hundred interviews focused on the home front experiences in the Bay Area, we focused on why people from different backgrounds came to the Bay Area, what they did when they arrived, and what they learned from the fluidity and flux of wartime life that affected decisions they made after the war ended. What did women learn about the relationships between work and family life? How did attitudes change toward education? How did war affect race relations and reshape civil rights struggles? Did new ideas about sexuality take root, and if so, why and where? What happened to entertainment? To what degree did religious organizations provide people with a new sense of community? Oral histories collected are used in the National Park Service’s Visitor Education Center at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Homefront National Historic Park and the Bancroft Library and available online below in transcript — and when possible — with videos synced to transcripts.

Magazine of the Brotherhood of Order of Railway Conductors and Brakemen.

Oregon HIstorical Society Digital collections related to labor --almost 2000 items to start your search

By narrowing this study to paid labor and within this time frame, the authors hope to better define the spaces within which women have operated and address the impacts on
women and their ability to earn income. This contains a timeline.
Introduction 1
Project Background 1
Potential Approaches 5
Project Approach and Methodology 10
2.
Oregon Women’s Labor History 13
Era of Protectionism for Women in the Workforce: 1903–1919 18
Rise of Labor Feminism and Wartime Employment: 1920–1945 43
Fight for Equality and a Place in the Workforce: 1946–1967 64
Push for Equality and Fairness and Second Wave Feminism: 1968–1990 83
3.
Associated Property Types 105
4.
Conclusion 115
Summary 115
5.
Bibliography 121
6.
Appendices 131
Annotated Bibliography 132
Timeline of Events 151
List of Known Resources 155

Libraries in the late 19th century were seen by their founders as instruments of social and cultural uplift, meant to raise the working class out their ignorance and teach them how to be middle class. But men like Oscar Ameringer, who immigrated to the United States from Germany when he was 15 and later became a socialist organizer, humorist, and editor, took away different lessons. In this selection from his 1940 autobiography, Ameringer described his discovery of American history books, translated into German, at the local public library.

Labor organizer and newspaper editor Oscar Ameringer the “Mark Twain of American Socialism,” as he was often called, was born in Bavaria in 1870 to a cabinetmaker father and a freethinking mother. In this excerpt from his autobiography,If You Don’t Weaken, published in 1940, he discussed his decision to emigrate to America in 1885 as a fifteen-year-old “hellion.” In America, Ameringer ultimately carved out a remarkable and colorful career as a musician, labor organizer, and especially, an editor of socialist and radical newspapers.

The Haymarket bombing in 1886 marked a major turning point in the history of nineteenth-century labor. Used by capitalists as an excuse for a crackdown on labor organizations, the bombing also splintered what up had been until then the strongest labor organization in the United States—the Knights of Labor. The anti-labor reaction that followed in the wake of the bombing helped precipitate a rapid decline in membership in the Knights which was eventually supplanted by the American Federation of Labor. In this excerpt from his autobiography, Oscar Ameringer, a Knight himself in 1886, recalled receiving the news about the Haymarket bombing while on strike in Cincinnati.

Oscar Neebe and the Haymarket Affair (History Matters): The Chicago radicals convicted of the infamous May 4, 1886 Haymarket Square bombing in which one policeman was killed remained openly defiant to the end. Unlike the other seven men convicted of the bombing, Oscar Neebe, a New York-born labor organizer who had been raised in Germany, received not death, but a fifteen-year jail sentence. Although Neebe insisted (accurately) that “there is no evidence”that he had connection with the bombing, he maintained, in this brief address, his solidarity with his comrades. “Your honor,” he told the judge, “I am sorry I am not to be hung with the rest of them.”

National level compared to Washington State, 1870-2006

Dani Willcutt of the MSU Department of History delivers the presentation "A Housewife's Crusade, Desegregation, and General Motors' Reign -or- Lansing, Michigan's Westside Neighborhood in 3D April 16th, 2024. "Serving It Up in the Capital City: Restaurants, Labor and Restaurant Labor in Lansing, Michigan, 1963 - 2008"

From "Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives" Brown Bag Series. 75-minute video program recorded in the Green Room of the MSU Library on Friday, November 15, 2019. Co-sponsored by the MSU Library Colloquia Series.

Nancy Wallach presents "Attention Must Be Paid: The Insistent Voice of Ralph Fasanella" on zoom and in the MSU Library Green Room. With questions and a response by Marc Fasanella. Part of the Visionary Art of Ralph Fasanella, an Our Daily Work / Our Daily Lives Symposium. September 14th, 2002.

A presentation of audiovisual materials drawn from the Ralph Fasanella Collection and Archive at the American Folk Art Museum: including selected television interviews,excerpts from documentaries, and rarely seen footage fromevents such as the artist’s 80th birthday and memorialservice. This presentation investigates tensions visible inFasanella’s self-presentation as both artist and worker, tracing influences and situating him in a lineage of artists inspired byworking-class communities. Followed by a discussion with Metropolitan Museum of Art Film Staff Stephanie Wuertzand Christopher Alessandrini, Introduced by Dean Rehberger

Art of Labor: Social Realism as a context for Fasanella –Peter Carravetta • The Migrant evidenced in MaterialCulture as depicted by Fasanella – Loredana Polezzi • Notesfor a film on Italian American Artists / Authors and othertransnational experiences – Simone Brioni • Venus Off theHalf Shell: Semiotic Translations of Female Icons…comparative analysis of two artists' interpretations ofmythical / typical women – Domenica Diraviam • FamilySupper: A Semiotic of Yesteryear – Anthony TamburriIntroduced by Marc Fasanella

Father, Friend, Folk Icon: a conversation with Ralph. Fasanella’s inner circle. Introduced by Kurt Dewhurst

Marc Fasanella talks about his father, Ralph Fasanella, one of the most important and influential painters of the late Twentieth Century. Ralph Fasanella’s works captured the lives, struggles, aspirations, and joys of workers and the labor movement for five decades from the 1940’s until his death in 1997. Fasanella is best known for his series of paintings on the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike, his canvases looking at his neighborhood and immigrant family, and his paintings that captured baseball in both professional ballparks and local sandlots. His paintings also have a strong political flavor with some of his works focusing on the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and the death of John F. Kennedy among others. Marc Fasanella is the author of Ralph Fasanella: Images of Optimism, which was published in 2017 by Pomegranate. Marc has taken a strong hand in the website, www.Fasanella.org, which is hosted on MSU’s Matrix site. Marc Fasanella is introduced by Michigan State University Professor John P. Beck. Part of the "Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives" Brown Bag series sponsored by the Michigan Traditional Arts Program (MSU Museum) and the Labor Education Program (MSU School of Human Resources and Labor Relations).

This session explores the labor and work themes withinRalph Fasanella's art. It also highlights the ways in whichFasanella's paintings have been used to build union pride andsolidarity and a larger appreciation of workers culture andlabor history. The panelists include Elise Bryant, the ExecutiveDirector of the Labor Heritage Foundation; Ron Carver,former union staff member and organizer of Public Domain;Christian McSweeney, Organizing Director of the AFL-CIO;and Jurg K. Siegenthaler, retired Professor of Sociology and aprime mover in the annual Lawrence, Massachusetts Breadand Roses Festival. John P. Beck, co-director of Our DailyWork/Our Daily Lives, will chair the panel.

"Breaking Curfew: Japanese American Workers and Everyday Resistance to World War Two Restrictions” presented by Anna Pegler-Gordon of James Madison College's Asian Pacific American Studies at MSU.

David Correia, of University of New Mexico/s American Studies Department, presents a zoom presentation titled "Set the Earth on Fire: Coal Miners, Capital and Cops in the Great Anthracite Strike of 1902" for Our Daily Work or Daily Lives. Correia argues that this labor struggle constructed modern policing.