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 this online collection explore how Paterson’s industrial heritage expresses itself in Paterson: in its work sites, work processes, and memories of workers. Included are interpretive essays exploring such topics as work in the African American community, local foodways, the ethnography of a single work place (Watson Machine International), business life along a single street in Paterson (21st Avenue), and narratives told by retired workers.
You May Also Like
Women Have Always Worked: Fighting for Equality: 1950–2018.
An exploration from an online edX course.
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…
In 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) issued the groundbreaking report, The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve. The report provided a counter-narrative to ideas popular among corporate education reformers (or de-formers, as some like to say).
The Pacific Northwest Antiwar and Radical History Project is a multimedia web project that aims to chronicle the social impact of war and the rich history of antiwar activity in the Northwest. With video oral histories, hundreds of photographs and documents, GI underground newspapers, movement…
What Made the Battle of Blair Mountain the Largest Labor Uprising in American History. Its legacy lives on today in the struggles faced by modern miners seeking workers’ rights
The Freedmen and Southern Society Project was established in 1976 to capture the essence of that revolution by depicting the drama of emancipation in the words of the participants: liberated slaves and defeated slaveholders, soldiers and civilians, common folk and the elite, Northerners and Southerners.…
Our collections are being digitized and made available through our website, OCLC WorldCat, Internet Archive, Digital Commonwealth, and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA).