The National Labor Union was founded on August 20, 1866, in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the first attempt to create a national labor group in the United States and one of their first actions was the first national call for Congress to mandate an 8-hour work day.
In 1820 Lowell, known as East Chelmsford, MA at the time, had a population of 200 and was a farming community. Thirty years later, the population had grown to 33,000 and one could find 32 textile mills in existence there. Lowell was an ideal location for these mills because it was located near the Merrimac River. The river supplied the water necessary to run these factories.
Just in time for a new academic year, the American Social History Project at the CUNY Graduate Center is releasing a new, expanded, and updated edition of the popular textbook Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History. A beta version is now available…
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000, is a resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women’s history. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, the collection seeks to advance scholarly…
LMU is a private Catholic university with 6,250 undergraduates, 2,150 graduate students and 1,100 law students from diverse backgrounds and many perspectives.
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) works tirelessly to improve the lives of working people.
The Studs Terkel Radio Archive (STRA), launched in May 2018 on Studs Terkel’s 106th birthday, is a digital platform whereon, eventually, will live the majority of the 5,600 radio programs Terkel created during his career at WFMT in Chicago between 1952 and 1997 live. This…
The repeated argument I hear from people who are opposed to Oklahoma teachers walking out tomorrow is “we knew what we were doing when we signed up for this.” You’re right. We did. We signed up for the hardest job in the world and putting our kids first. Here’s a poem about it.
“And that’s how we did in the mill” is based on excerpts from oral histories with the last generation of women to work in the Lowell, Massachusetts textile mills, recorded by filmmaker Martha Norkunas in 1983.
