A gallery of photos to explore.
In the early 19th century the United States of America began to experience many changes. In parts of the country there was a shift from an agrarian society to an industrial society.
Prelinger Archives was founded in 1983 by Rick Prelinger in New York City. Over the next twenty years, it grew into a collection of over 60,000 “ephemeral” (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress,…
The Samuel Gompers Papers collects, annotates, and makes available primary sources of American labor history. Founded by Stuart Kaufman in 1974, the project has published two microfilm series of union records and eleven volumes of Gompers’ papers. The nation’s leading trade unionist in the late…
Perched atop a mountain ridge at the center of one of the planet’s largest concentrations of disturbed terrain, Eckley Miners’ Village is a world within a world. Visit our authentic 19th-century company mining town, and experience the lives of the working-class families who once fueled America.
As early as the 1830s, many U.S. states had enacted laws restricting or prohibiting the employment of young children in industrial settings. However, in rural communities where child labor on the farm was common, employment of children in mills and factories did not arouse much…
Women Have Always Worked: Fighting for Equality: 1950–2018.
An exploration from an online edX course.
When Teachers Mobilize Oral Histories
This collection presents 470 interview excerpts and 3882 photographs from the Working in Paterson Folklife Project of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The four-month study of occupational culture in Paterson, New Jersey, was conducted in 1994. The documentary materials presented in…
