Lowell’s water-powered textile mills catapulted the nation – including immigrant families and early female factory workers – into an uncertain new industrial era. Nearly 200 years later, the changes that began here still reverberate in our shifting global economy. Explore Lowell, a living testament to the dynamic human story of the industrial revolution.
The Knights of Labor was the largest and most extensive association of workers in 19th century America. Organized in 1869, the movement grew slowly in the 1870s, then surged in the 1880s, reaching a peak membership approaching one million in 1886-1887 with Local Assemblies spread across the country in more than 5,600 cities and towns.
In this oral history website Brooklyn College students narrate two historical episodes: their experiences of working on farms during World War II, and the events surrounding the suspension of the Vanguard, the student newspaper in a postwar McCarthy era climate. The edited testimony is accompanied…
This is the official bibliography for LAWCHA’s Teaching and Public Sector Unionism initiative. A full listing of our resources can be found on the Teaching Resources page. For an overview of teachers’ unions, see our featured article, “A Century of Teacher Organizing: What Can We…
The Howling Mob Society was a Pittsburgh-based group of anonymous artists, activists, and citizen historians with an interest in the oft-buried radical peoples’ history of the United States. We worked as a team throughout 2007-08 to research, fabricate, and install a series of ten historical markers which detail the events of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 as they unfolded in Pittsburgh, PA.
One of the most significant struggles for workers’ rights began on January 12, 1912, in Lawrence, Mass., when thousands of textile workers began a walkout that would come to be known as the Bread and Roses Strike, the Lawrence Textile Strike, and the Singing Strike. Read an overview and find teaching resources below.
The Lawrence Textile Strike was a public protest mainly of immigrant workers from several countries, including Austria, Belgium, Cuba, Canada, France, England, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Spain, Syria, and Turkey. According to the 1910 census, 65% of mill workers (many of whom eventually struck) lived in the United States for less than 10 years; 47% for less than five years.
