National History Day
PRIMARY SOURCES Partial Bibliography
- Newspapers, including Labor Newspapers. Today, local and national newspapers cover work and working people sporadically. Newspapers focused on the interests and activities of working people were widespread in the late 19th century through the mid-20th century; a few are still published in the 21st century. They carry stories about local and national events, labor leaders, politics, court cases, strikes, and more that could be the subject of a case study exploring one of the questions above. Stories in labor presses frequently offer different perspectives on events covered in non-labor newspapers. Some labor presses have been digitized:
- Northwest Labor Press, archive (1916-present) Archives – NW Labor Press
- Industrial Worker Industrial Worker TABLE OF CONTENTS (marxists.org), 1907-1913. Industrial Worker was the newspaper of the Industrial Workers of the World [IWW]
- Labor Press Project: Pacific Northwest Labor and Radical Newspapers (University of Washington) Labor Press Project (washington.edu) secondary essays on a number of labor newspapers published in the Northwest.
- Labor Notes archive Labor Notes Archive | Page 2 | Labor Notes Labor Notes is a media and organizing project that has been the voice of union activists since 1979. Labor Notes maintains a website and publishes a magazine to promote organizing unions, alliances with worker centers, and unions that are run by their members.
- Sweatshop Watch Newsletter Cornell eCommons :: Browsing by Author Sweatshop Watch was a California-based international coalition of organizations dedicated to ending sweatshop labor.
- Union newspapers, British Columbia, Canada Union Newspapers – Working People Built BC (labourheritagecentre.ca)
- Also see: Chronicling America Chronicling America « Library of Congress (loc.gov) (not labor-specific, but with many local newspapers that can be searched for labor-related topics. Searchable by state, date, search term)
- Labor Contracts: Contracts related to work reveal legally binding notions of rights and responsibilities related to work: American workers have experienced two types of labor contracts (1) coercive, such as 17th-18th century indenture servant contracts, late 19th-early 20th century sharecropping contracts, and late 20th century non-disclosure agreements [NDAs]; and (2) collectively bargained, in the form of labor union contracts which became more prevalent in the 20th century.
- Indenture servant contracts
- Indentured servant contracts for the colonies of Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Barbados (folger.edu) (select “linked resource”)
- Virtual Jamestown; Indentured Servants in Colonial Virginia – Encyclopedia Virginia (includes links to primary source, indenture contracts);
- Ch. 3.1. Primary Sources: Indentured Servant Contracts – American Legal History to the 1860s (unizin.org)
- Sharecropping contracts
- Bracero Program
- Collective Bargaining Agreements
- Collective Bargaining Agreements (cornell.edu)
- Ask a local union if they will share their past collectively bargained contracts. (think about the types of work near you that might be done under a collectively bargained contract, eg: teachers, electricians, ironworkers, city workers, nurses)
- Indenture servant contracts
- Oral histories. These can shed light on perspectives and experiences that don’t show up in the written record.
- Create an oral history primary source(s) by interviewing workers, labor activists, and/or union leaders in your local area
- Ask a state or local history society or museum if they have worker or labor oral histories.
- Iowa Labor Oral History Project Iowa Labor History Oral Project | Labor Center – The University of Iowa (uiowa.edu) 1,000 interviews
- Voices of Labor Oral History Project, Georgia State University Collection: Voices of Labor Oral History Project | ArchivesSpace at GSU Library 48 interviews (audio + transcripts); there is a brief description of the content of each interview
- Labor History Resource Project. A clearinghouse with many links to labor history events, primary source collections, and secondary sources. For example:
- Defending Labor’s Rights: Working Class Politics, 1859-1924 The Samuel Gompers Papers (umd.edu)
- Civil Rights & Labor History Consortium, University of Washington Civil Rights & Labor History Consortium (washington.edu)