Collection:

The Iowa Labor History Oral Project (ILHOP) is an innovative statewide initiative to document Iowa’s rich labor and working class history through the collection and preservation of oral histories. A joint project of the Iowa Federation of Labor (AFL-CIO), the University of Iowa Labor Center,…

Through the Montana Memory Project, the Montana Historical Society has created a rich archive of hundreds of interviews detailing the history of workers in key industries in Montana. The interviews capture the stories of laborers, labor leadership, and support industry workers, from the expansion in…

A new LAWCHA initiative to develop classroom and public knowledge of labor history. Teaching Labor’s Story will be a repository of primary sources with supporting teaching guides (textual, visual, audio). Resources in the Teaching Labor’s Story repository are designed to be readily incorporated into existing…

The film describes the extraordinary anti-slavery efforts taking place in the mid-19th century in Lowell. Forrant and Grooms visit the sites that still exist in downtown Lowell where abolitionist activity occurred and where freedom seekers operated businesses.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Boott Cotton Mills Museum gives a snapshot of what is was like to work in New England cotton mills in the 1800s. The Museum, once Boott Mill #6, was originally owned by Kirk Boott, an industrialist who was responsible for much of the early urban planning that shaped Lowell’s industrial and residential landscape.

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.

The wildcat Postal strike that began on March 18, 1970 signaled the end of collective begging and the beginning of collective bargaining that raised hundreds of thousands of postal workers, craft and management, from poverty level wages to middle class wage earners.

The first mass work stoppage in the 195-year history of the Postal Service began on March 18, 1970, with a walkout of letter carriers in Brooklyn and Manhattan who were demanding better wages.