The Westinghouse Works Collection contains 21 actuality films showing various views of Westinghouse companies. Most prominently featured are the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, and the Westinghouse Machine Company. The films were intended to showcase the company’s operations. Exterior and interior shots of the factories are shown along with scenes of male and female workers performing their duties at the plants.
On November 23, 1909, more than 20,000 Yiddish-speaking immigrants, mostly young women in their teens and early twenties, launched an eleven-week general strike in New York’s shirtwaist industry. Dubbed the Uprising of the 20,000, it was the largest strike by women to date in American history.
The CIO transformed American labor and American politics. Defying the American Federation of Labor’s commitment to craft unionism, the Committee for Industrial Organization was established in 1935 by leaders of the United Mine Workers and other AFL unions who embraced industrial union organizing strategies.
Lowell built on the advances made in the British textile industry, such as the use of the power loom, to industrialize American textile production. He was the first factory owner in the United States to create a textile mill that was vertically integrated.
LaborArts presents powerful images to further understanding of the past and present lives of working people. Our events and contests expand on this effort. The site includes curated Exhibits on particular subjects; the Collection, where one can search images from exhibits and other sources; and…
On May 8, 1970, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped five points to finish at 717, in the slowest day of trading in months. In the streets outside the New York Stock Exchange, however, chaos erupted: at noon, hundreds of construction workers arrived on Wall…
This website includes the records of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and a collection of six oral histories from the National Education Association (NEA). Visit site
The Southern Oral History Program Interview Database provides detailed descriptions of interviews in the Southern Oral History Program Collection (04007). The interviews in this collection were conducted or collected under the auspices of the Southern Oral History Program in the Center for the Study of…
Designed for both high school and college classrooms, History Matters helps students actively interpret evidence about the lives of ordinary Americans. It contains descriptions of and links to more than 1000 websites and first-person primary source documents, guides for analyzing historical evidence, classroom activities, and…
