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COM 400 - Communication and Labor: Finding Primary Sources
Primary sources provide a window into the past that can often tell you much more about a person, place, or time than anything else. Use these databases, archives, and websites to find photographs, letters, diaries, artwork, and more.
Provides online full-text access to more than 100 projects that present and interpret historic documents related to women's history in American activism, most of which are not otherwise available online. Each project poses an interpretive question and provides a collection of documents that address the question. The site includes thousands of primary documents, analyses, images, and charts, and links out to relevant websites. Also includes the online edition of the five-volume biographical dictionary, Notable American Women (1971-2004).
From the website: This collection explores women's roles in the US economy between 1800 and the Great Depression. Working conditions, conditions in the home, costs of living, recreation, health and hygiene, conduct of life, policies and regulations governing the workplace, and social issues are all well documented by original source material.
Oral histories, timeline, essays, archives, photographs, online exhibits, and additional primary source materials documenting the activities of volunteers who worked with Cesar Chavez to build his farmworker movement between 1962 and 1993.
The Southern Labor Archives is the official repository for hundreds of local and regional union offices, as well as the national offices of the IAM, National Federation of Federal Employees, United Garment Workers of America, United Furniture Workers of America, PATCO, and the United Textile Workers of America as well as many other union offices and state federations of labor, including the Georgia AFL-CIO.
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. Search for labor materials; some may be restricted.
These images from Washington State University document the Latino experience in the Yakima Valley and agricultural protest movements in Washington state between 1967 and 1976, and approximately 100 of those images are currently presented here in this digital collection. The images in the collection explore Latino life in and around migrant worker labor camps and in the agricultural fields, and depict labor activist Cesar Chavez visiting the Yakima Valley on several occasions. The collection also depicts figures that were eventually involved in protests in and around Seattle and the University of Washington, protesting grape boycotts and other issues relating to agricultural workers.
A selection of digitized items drawn from the Labor Archives of Washington Collections and UW Libraries Special Collections including records documenting the Industrial Workers of the World in the Pacific Northwest, Filipino and Asian American cannery unionism, labor espionage and spies, labor and the New Deal, the Everett Massacre and Centralia Tragedy, and WTO protests Seattle.
Guide to primary and secondary sources related to U.S. labor. Includes links to statistics, government documents, oral histories, photographs, websites, film, and printed materials.
Library and Archives at Wayne State University in Detroit offers digital images and audio clips of strikes in the United States, United Auto Workers (UAW), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Air Line Pilots Association, American Federation of Teachers, Coalition of Labor Union Women, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), National Association of Letter Carriers, United Farm Workers, and the 1932 Ford Hunger March.
An interpretive online exhibit examining the historical and cultural context of the the Industrial Workers of the World Photograph Collection at the Labor Archives of Washington State, University of Washington Libraries Special Collections.
Women's history collections from the Washington State Historical Society, Western Washington University, the University of Washington, Washington State University and The Evergreen State College.
