American Studies

This site offers an introduction to the civil rights movements in Seattle, which not only began well before the struggles in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, but were deeply connected to the region’s labor movement. They also involved not just African American activists but Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Jews, Latinos, and Native Americans.

The Bracero History Archive collects and makes available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964. Millions of Mexican agricultural workers crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the states in America.

The Farmworker Movement Documentation Project was founded in 2003. The project seeks to compile and publish primary source accounts from the volunteers who worked with Cesar Chavez to build his farmworker movement during the period, 1962-1993.

Books and journals in the field of home economics, published between 1850 and 1950

A digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.

A consortium of 12 labor and civil rights history projects. They bring together maps, films, slide shows, nearly one hundred video oral history interviews, and several thousand photographs, documents, and digitized newspaper articles.

Georgia State University's Southern Labor Archives, established in 1971, is dedicated to collecting, preserving and making available the documentary heritage of Southern workers and their unions, as well as that of workers and unions having an historic relationship to the region.

A digital exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression, from Harvard University's library holdings. Provide access to digitized books (over 2000), manuscripts (10,000 pages) and images (1,000) from the collections of Harvard University Libraries and Museums on the topic of women in the U.S. economy from 1870-1930.

Fitch captured images of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, and Dorothy Day and images of the people who fought for change in movements for civil rights and the rights of labor.

From the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University a collection of images from many different labor organizations and events, including the 1932 Ford Hunger March, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Industrial Workers of the World.

The George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archive is the largest single donation to the University Libraries and complements other labor-related collections in our libraries. The AFL-CIO Archive consists of approximately 40 million documents and other archival material that help researchers better understand pivotal social movements in this country, including those to gain rights for women, children and minorities.

The Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives is the unit of Catherwood Library that collects, preserves, and makes accessible special collections pertaining to the history of the workplace and labor relations. This collection holds the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union records, among others.

The library and archives hold archival, print, photograph, film, and oral history collections that describe the history of the labor movement and how it related to the broader struggle for economic, social, and political change.

The Reuther Library is the largest labor archives in North America and is home to the collections of numerous unions and labor-related organizations. Its collection strengths extend to the political and community life of urban and metropolitan Detroit, the civil rights movement in Michigan and nationally, and women's struggles in the workplace.