Encyclopedia

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History essays are based on the latest, most persuasive research and incorporate visual and sound materials and links to original sources that could not be included in a traditional printed encyclopedia. The section on Labor and Working Class History has 82 entries and can be found here.  NOTE: This trial ends February 24. eBook

The Oxford encyclopedia of American business, labor, and economic history. Melvyn Dubofsky, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. eBook

The encyclopedia of strikes in American history. Aaron Brenner, Benjamin Day, Immanuel Ness, eds. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2009. eBook

Labor conflict in the United States: An encyclopedia. Ronald L. Filippelli, ed. New York: Garland Pub., 1990. Print

Olson, James Stuart. Encyclopedia of the industrial revolution in America. James S. Olson, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002 Print - in-depth coverage of the economic, political, and social developments of the Industrial Revolution in the United States from 1750 to 1920. More than 200 substantial entries cover: key individuals, significant technologies, inventions, court cases, companies, political institutions, economic events, and legislation.

General Bibliographies on U.S. Labor History  

Labor -- United States -- History -- Bibliography

 

Librarians organize information using controlled vocabulary. The books in most academic libraries are organized by Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in addition to author and title, and most subjects are subdivided by more specific subheadings. Not even your subject specialist librarians have memorized all of the LCSHs for their fields. If you don't know the LCSH for the topic you are searching, you can begin with a keyword ("Word(s)") search in the Classic Catalog. When you find a title that fits your topic, you can click on its record, find its LCSH ("Subjects"), and then click on that link to find all titles in the WUSTL libraries under that subject heading. Keep in mind, most books have multiple subject headings, and not all books which you might consider relevant to your topic will appear under the same subject heading. After you have exhausted the holdings at WUSTL Libraries, expand your search to include MOBIUS and WorldCat holdings. 

Don't forget that HISTORIOGRAPHY is a LCSH. Use it in combination with other headings like "United States," "labor movement" and/or "working class" to find titles like David R. Roediger's Towards the abolition of whiteness: Essays on race, politics, and working class history or Staughton Lynd's Doing history from the bottom up.

See the Academic Journals tab under ARTICLES on my American History LibGuide

Primary Sources in Print

Labor -- United States -- History -- Sources

Newspapers

See the Periodicals: Journals, Newspapers & Magazines section of the American History LibGuide

Primary Source Databases

Leftist Newspapers and Periodicals 1845 - 2015 - covers communist, socialist and Marxist thought, theory and practice. Issues covered include workers’ rights, organized labor, labor strikes, Nazi atrocities, McCarthyism’s rise after WWII, Civil Rights, and relatively recent class struggles 

The Gilded Age 

The Gilded Age (1865-1904) primary documents and scholarly commentary covering such themes as race, labor, immigration, commerce, western expansion, and women’s suffrage during the decades between the end of the Civil War and the election of Theodore Roosevelt.

Migrant Farm Labor

National Farm Worker Ministry: Mobilizing Support for Migrant Workers, 1939-1985 

African American Labor

Fight for Racial Justice and the Civil Rights Congress 

Federal Surveillance of African Americans, 1920-1984 

African America, Communists, and the National Negro Congress

Domestic Labor

Quest for Labor Equality in Household Work: National Domestic Workers Union, 1965-1979

Vietnam War and Labor

Intelligence Reports from the National Security Council's Vietnam Information Group, 1967-1975 

Open Access Digital Collections at Universities with Strong Labor History Collections 

Many universities and other research archives have partially digitized their special collections. It is worth searching the digital collections and online exhibitions of the institutions geographically related to your study area or of institutions with strong labor collections. Search for "X university" or "Y state library," and the digitized portion of their collection is usually under "Special Collections." For example:

The Columbia Center for Oral History (CCOH) was founded by historian and journalist Allan Nevins in 1948 and is credited with launching the establishment of oral history archives internationally. At over 10,000 interviews, the Oral History Archives is one of the largest oral history collections in the United States. 

Columbia University Libraries Digital Library Collections includes the papers of Hubert H. Harrison (1883-1927), Harlem's first great soapbox orator and the father of Harlem radicalism. By 1911, he had become a leading activist and theoretician for the Socialist Party in New York City and soon thereafter he began actively supporting the Industrial Workers of the World.  

Wayne State University Library System's digital collections represent text, images, and audiovisual material and are sourced from both the Libraries’ Special Collections and the Walter P. Reuther Library's archival collections. It includes some relevant sub-collections like the Industrial Workers of the World collection and the United Farm Workers Image Gallery. 

UMass-Amherst has 230 documents related to the American Labor Party within the W.E.B. DuBois collection as well as the Charles L Whipple papers, the son of a successful dry goods merchant who worked for the Boston Globe for most of his adult life and was attracted to radical labor politics. 

University of Michigan Libraries has digitized the photographs within the Joseph A. Labadie Collection, one of the oldest, largest, and most comprehensive collections of its kind, with materials on anarchism, anti-colonialist movements, antiwar and pacifist movements, atheism and free thought, civil liberties and civil rights, ecology, labor and workers’ rights, feminism, LGBTQ movements, prisons and prisoners, the New Left, the Spanish Civil War, and youth and student protest. Charles Joseph "Jo" Antoine Labadie (1850-1933) was an American labor organizer, anarchist,  activist, printer, publisher, essayist, and poet.

Local Special Collections

WUSTL Libraries' Julian Edison Department of Special Collections has William Sentner Papers, documenting St. Louis labor movements, various unions, as well as material regarding his political activities and legal battles. The collection contains photographs, labor newsletters, collected news clippings about Sentner, legal and union documents, and Sentner’s personal correspondence; David Burbank Papers correspondence, clippings, and 9 reels of microfilm that chronicle labor history, particularly in St. Louis; Washington University New Left Federation Collection, and Washington University Labor Organizing Committee Records.  

St. Louis Public Library (1301 Olive Blvd) has a Women’s Labor Literature Collection (1894-1944) and St. Louis Labor, the weekly newspaper of the Socialist Labor Party of St. Louis, for most but not all years from 1893 through 1930. 

Missouri Historical Society's Library and Research Center (225 S. Skinker) has Joseph Parker Gazzam's papers (a mining engineer in Missouri, Colorado, and South Africa, before returning to St. Louis. He witnessed the Leadville, Colorado, miners’ strike of 1896. The collection includes an essay on the Leadville strike of 1896; and correspondence and other material regarding South African mining ventures and the import and use of Chinese laborers); Gottlieb A. Hoehn's Papers (labor and socialist pioneer; editor and general manager of the Arbeiter Zeitung and its English companion, The Labor News and secretary of the Socialist party in
Missouri), and a general labor collection, 1830-1975. Search their Finding Aid for "labor" or "union" here. 

State Historical Society of Missouri’s (Thomas Jefferson Library, UMSL Campus) labor collections preserve the historical records of working people and their organizations. These collections include materials such as union records, papers of labor leaders and organizations, and other materials on labor-related issues. Several manuscript collections reflect the experience of labor organizations in Missouri. Examples of these collections include the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union Records, the Kansas City Typographical Union (ITU) #80 Records, and the James Adam Davis Papers.

Searching other Archival Collections

Use Archive Finder, a directory describing numerous collections of primary source material housed throughout English-speaking regions.