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)

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

Topic Specific
- - International Ladies Garment Workers Union [ILGWU] archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University. Includes digitized letters, pamphlets, videos and television commercials, and other highlights from the archive’s ILGUW collection
  - Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement [DRUM] records, Walther Reuther Library, Wayne State University. Digitized collection offer firsthand information about the demands, political viewpoints and allies of Black workers during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
  - 9to5 National Association of Working Women, Walther Reuther Library, Wayne State University.digitized records include selected posters, images, publications, oral histories.
  - Leonard Scott Union-Prevention and Counter-Union Campaign Consulting Files, 1966-2013. Kheel Center, Cornell University. Collection includes training materials and related articles, files from counter-union campaigns waged for a variety of companies, and other anti-union and union-busting consulting records.
  - Report of the Committee of the [US] Senate Upon the Relations Between Labor and Capital, 1883.
  - Industrial Depressions – First Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor. 1886. Commissioner of Labor, Carroll Wright, collected quantitative and qualitative data to demonstrate both working-class poverty and working-class critiques of the capitalist system. He issued reports to capture workers’ perspectives on various questions. These are an invaluable resource into first-hand accounts of ordinary workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
  - Convict Labor – Second Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor,
  - A Report on Labor Disturbances in the State of Colorado, 1880-1904, with correspondence relating thereto. Prepared under the direction of Carroll D. Wright, commissioner of labor. January 27, 1905. HathiTrust.
  - Labor Troubles in the Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania, 1887-1888. 50^th US Congress, Report 4147. Library of Congress. HathiTrust
  - Report on the Chicago Strike of June-July 1894, United States Strike Commission. Includes appendices with testimony, proceedings, and recommendations. HathiTrust
  - Report on Prison Labor by Labor Commissioner Carroll Wright, 1899. HathiTrust
  - Report of the Industrial Commission on Capital and Labor, 1900, Manufactures and General Business 56^th Congress, Document 495.HathiTrust
  - Final Report of the Commission on Industrial Relations, 1915. This Commission was created by act of Congress; commissioners were appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. The Commission made a wide-ranging investigation of working conditions and labor conflicts.