Discover
When Teacher’s Mobilize
When Teachers Mobilize explores and examines the causes, organizing, success, and ongoing legacies of this movement of educators through oral histories and digital media.
Membership Denied: Braceros and the Conditional Value of Labor
This exhibit invites viewers to examine how the Bracero Program constructed a vision of belonging rooted in productivity and labor. At the same time, it challenges this normative narrative by departing from images of the “ideal” Bracero worker. Through selected photographs and commentary, the exhibit encourages viewers to see Mexican guest workers beyond the framework imposed by the U.S. immigration system, prompting us to question notions of earned value and instead center inherent human worth.
Local & Regional Resources
Some of the most important resources available to tell the stories of workers and their movements, past and present, are being assembled at the local or regional level. Below we are assembling links to some of the most active and rich historical sources.
Teaching Resources
Labor education has a proud tradition in the United States, but today, very little labor history is taught in K-12 schools. Courses on business, finance, and management from the top down, having long been taught at the college level, are ever-more prevalent in high schools, but working people’s lives, labor, and organizing are often relegated to the margins of history surveys if they are discussed at all. These omissions minimize the enormous role the labor movement has played in shaping American politics, culture, and society, and it misses a tremendous opportunity to connect students’ own, family, and community experiences of work to the pasts they study in school. Thankfully, labor historians and educators in many contexts are working to address this challenge.
Lowell Mill Girls
The Lowell mill girls were young female workers who came to work in industrial corporations in Lowell, Massachusetts, during the Industrial Revolution in the United States.
We are historians preserving labor history and the stories of working people
In recent years, the nature of work and the lives of working people have been radically transformed. Labor unions no longer speak with the authority they once possessed. Our information about work and workers now is published, presented, and produced in multiple ways, and sometimes filtered such that the stories are incomplete.
For students, teachers, workers, and a curious public, the Labor History Resource Project will foreground the images, words, voices, and films of workers in the past and present; identify and create materials that can inform and to enlarge our understanding of the contributions workers have made in American history.; and work with archivists, librarians, curators, and learning institutions to highlight resources vital to the story of our time.
The Labor History Resource Project provides a platform for making labor history visible, and it will help to sponsor the creation of new educational resources about neglected chapters of our history.
We invite you to explore the initiative – launching now – and to join our work and get involved.