Labor History Commons^™

Who Really Said What? Mobile Historical Situated Documentary As Liminal Learning Space, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article explores the complexities and affordances of historical representation that arose in the process of designing a mobile augmented reality video game for teaching history. The process suggests opportunities to push the historical documentary form in new ways. Specifically, the article addresses the shifting liminal space between historical fiction narrative, and historical interactive documentary narrative. What happens when primary sources, available for examination are placed inside of a historically inspired narrative, one that hews closely to the events, but creates drama through dialogues between player and historical figure? In this relatively new field of interactive historical situated documentary, how …

"We Are Americans, Too:" Interracial Relations In Detroit's Postwar Auto Industry, Andrew C. Nosti

Student Publications

This analysis looks at the interracial relations and conflicts within the postwar Detroit auto industry. In doing so, it examines the role the UAW, the government, the corporations, and the workers themselves played, and how race and/or gender contributed to interactive negotiations within the employment sector at the time.

How The City Of Indianapolis Came To Have African American Policemen And Firemen 80 Years Before The Modern Civil Rights Movement., Leon E. Bates

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores a series of events that occurred in the spring of 1876. The relationship between the Indianapolis city government, the Marion County Courts, the Indianapolis Police Department, and the African American community came together to usher in changes never before envisioned. The Indianapolis Police Department (IPD) was formed in 1855, then disbanded 12 months later in a political dispute. From 1857-to-1876, the IPD was all white. These changes took place as the Reconstruction era was coming to a close. The first Ku Klux Klan was at its apex, terrorizing black communities, and Jim Crow was coming into its …

Major League Baseball's Latin American Connection: Salaries, Scouting, And Globalization, Ezequiel Kitsu Lihosit

Theses

This research examines the history of foreign, Latin American Major League baseball players. It looks at the history of the players, their countries and the expansion of recruitment and training in Latin America. Other factors such as race and labor relations contributed greatly to shifts in player recruitment by MLB. Baseball is an international game and today more than 25% of all major leaguers are foreign-born Latin Americans. This project lays out how this occurred and how the academy training system has evolved and become the industry standard for teams. Through both the history of the earliest Latin American players …

Haymarket & Immigration: A Legacy Of Anarchist Fear, Kaysie Harrington

Honors Projects

The 1903 Alien Immigration Act, more commonly known as the Anti-Anarchist Act, was the first United States immigration policy to exclude persons based on political ideology. The following research explores the evolution of anti-anarchist sentiment in the US, following one of the nation’s first experiences with anarchist behavior: The Chicago Haymarket Affair of 1886, an incident in which a pipe bomb thrown in midst of a labor riot ultimately led to the arrest and highly publicized prosecution of eight anarchists. After the Haymarket Affair, both the United States government and the public defined anarchism as being the domain of alien …

Father And Servant, Son And Slave: Judaism And Labor In Georgia, 1732–1809, Kylie L. Mccormick

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In 1732 a philanthropic trusteeship was granted the charter to Georgia with the lofty goals of bringing aid to the impoverished in the British Empire and the persecuted Protestants of Europe. Within these goals was an emphasis on using the labor of indentured white servants, an unofficial ban on slavery, and a reluctance to allow Jewish colonists. To understand how both slavery and Judaism took hold in Georgia, this two part study explores the changing labor institutions through the lives of Benjamin Sheftall and his youngest son Levi—the two men who maintained the first Vital Records for Savanah’s Jewry. Benjamin’s …

Dorothy Sue Cobble Interview, Jennifer Thomson

Bucknell: Occupied

Jennifer Thomson, assistant professor of History at Bucknell University, interviews Dorothy Sue Cobble, professor at Rutgers University in the departments of Labor Studies and Employee Relations and the department of History. Thomson and Cobble discuss the feminism movements in the United States and the intersection of women's movements with labor and class movements. Cobble discusses grassroots activism, movements for equal rights and equal pay, and the changing objectives of feminists. Thomson and Cobble conclude by discussing contemporary issues and the historical precedent of affecting change at the state level.

The Minnesota Farm-Labor Party: The Role Of Third Parties In The Americanization Of European Labor Radicals In The Great Lakes Region, Paul Lubotina

Upper Country: A Journal of the Lake Superior Region

This paper examines the political transformation of former radicals from Ethnic Socialist Parties, Industrial Workers of the World, and the Western Federation of Miners during the 1920s and 1930s, as they joined mainstream third party organizations such as The Nonpartisan League and Farm-Labor Party of Minnesota. Former resident of Copper Harbor, Michigan and mayor of Hibbing, Minnesota, Victor Power led a coalition of Americans and immigrants in a struggle to circumvent the burgeoning power of Ku Klux Klan members who dominated local government in the city, with the support of the United States Steel Corporation. This political battle between progressive …

Playing For The People: Labor Sport Union Athletic Clubs In The Lake Superior/Iron Range 1927-1936, Gabe Logan

Upper Country: A Journal of the Lake Superior Region

From 1927-1935 the United States Communist Party developed and implemented the Labor Sport Union (LSU). This athletic experiment encouraged workers to abandon paternalistic company teams, theologically inspired gyms such as the YMCA and YWCA, and withdraw their support from school sponsored athletics. Instead, workers would join the LSU, a worker controlled sporting fraternity. The LSU enjoyed support in the metropolitan centers of the Northeast and Midwest. However, it was also enthusiastically received in the rural mining and farming regions of Lake Superior. This work recounts the history of the LSU in general and its specific development in upper Michigan, northern …

No News Is Good News: Newspaper Reports Of Calumet’S Italian Hall Disaster, Allie Penn

Upper Country: A Journal of the Lake Superior Region

This paper focuses on the newspaper bias within various newspapers after the Italian Hall Disaster in Calumet, Michigan. The paper samples newspapers from Calumet, Houghton, and Hancock, the Upper Peninsula, Lower Peninsula, Midwest locations and major metropolitan areas. It uses primary resources, including interviews and the Coroner’s Inquest to evaluate the accuracy within multiple newspaper articles.

Run Of The Mine: Miners, Farmers, And The Non-Union Spirit Of The Gilded Age, 1886-1896, Dana M. Caldemeyer

Theses and Dissertations--History

“Run of the Mine” examines why workers refused to join unions in the late nineteenth century. Through a focus on the men and women involved in the southern Midwest coal industry who quit or did not join unions, this dissertation analyzes the economic, geographic, and racial factors that contributed to workers’ attitudes toward national unions like the United Mine Workers of America (UMW). It argues that the fluidity between rural industries that allowed residents to work in multiple occupations throughout the year dramatically shaped worker expectations for their unions. This occupational fluidity that allowed miners to farm and farmers to …

Drive Toward Freedom: African American: The Story Of Black Automobility In The Fight For Civil Rights, Xavier Macy

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Looking across the 20^th century, this thesis seeks to understand the relationship African Americans developed between automobility and the fight for civil rights, filling a gap left in the historiography of both the automobile and the Civil Rights Movement. Historians of the automobile have almost exclusively focused their lens on white suburbia and the “autotopias” that Americans created, while historians of the Civil Rights Movement ignored the automobile entirely. This thesis hopes to begin to fill that void by explaining how African Americans exploited the technological system of the automobile to create forms of transportation accessible to African American …

"Portraits Of Freedom" Opening Reception And Art Exhibition Grant Report For Humanities Texas, Kyle Ainsworth

Librarian and Staff Publications

The Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, on behalf of the East Texas Research Center (ETRC), Ralph W. Steen Library, Stephen F. Austin State University (SFA), was awarded a Humanities Texas mini-grant to provide programming for the opening reception of the Portraits of Freedom art exhibition, June 11, 2015. A $1,000 grant from Humanities Texas paid the honoraria for two guest speakers, Dr. Douglas Chambers from the University of Southern Mississippi and Dr. Daina Berry from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Chambers spoke about runaway slaves in the Atlantic World and Dr. Berry about Juneteenth and the Civil …

"Pray For The People Who Feed You": Voices Of Pauper Children In The Industrial Age, Rebecca S. Duffy, Jill Ogline Titus

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Following the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, countries such as the United States and England experienced a widening gap between the rich industrialists and the impoverished working class. As a result, poverty quickly shifted from a localized problem to a national epidemic. Each country was faced with the challenges of addressing and alleviating poverty on a national scale. With a limited amount of resources, questions arose about who should receive relief. What should it look like? How should it be administered? And how would poverty and policy affect political, economic, social and familial structures? [ …

Centralia, Collective Memory, And The Tragedy Of 1919, Shawn T. Daley

Dissertations and Theses

The Centralia Tragedy of 1919 has been represented in numerous works over the course of the past 100 years. The vast majority of them concern the events of the day of the Tragedy, November 11, 1919, and whether a small group of Wobblies – members of a union group known as the International Workers of the World (I.W.W.) – opened fire on a group of parading American Legionnaires. This particular element, whether or not the Wobblies opened fire on the Legionnaires or the Legionnaires actually charged the hall where the Wobblies were staying, has generated significant concern in academic and …

The Repatriation Of Mexican-Americans To America, Aaron Ziskin

History

Shortly following the onset of the Great Depression America undertook a policy coined as Mexican Repatriation wherein it began encouraging people of Mexican descent to return home in order to free up jobs for 'actual' American citizens. This Policy touched countless people as it was broadly applied to anyone of the Mexican race, however as American influence in World War II increased it began facing a worker shortage. In response to this shortage America and Mexico devised a program which allowed for Mexican laborers to be imported for temporary farm and manual labor positions. The focus of this paper involves …

Preserving Pullman: Historic District Becomes Illinois' First National Monument

DePaul Magazine

Pullman has long had a place in history, labor and urban planning, but the spotlight on this far South Side neighborhood is about to get a whole lot brighter. On Feb. 19, President Barack Obama announced the designation of the Pullman Historic District as a national monument. With this move, Pullman entered the National Park Service portfolio, joining such iconic American sites as the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore, and becoming the first national monument in Illinois. Pullman's history, architectural significance, and residents are spotlighted.

The Society For Establishing Useful Manufactures: Class And Political Economy In The Early Republic, Daniel Pace

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

The Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures was one of the first corporations in American history. The company was an attempt by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, with the help of his Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Tench Coxe, to turn Hamilton’s “Report on Manufactures” into a physical reality. Although the SUM would dissolve only five years after openings its doors, there is plenty to extract from the company’s practices. Through the SUM, Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist contemporaries attempted to recreate, and unite, a weak and fledgling United States by strengthening the nation politically and economically. The Society was …

Insurgent Labor Activists At Yale, 1968-1971, Raymond L. Noonan Iii

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

At noon on April 30, 1971, some Yale students began busing their own trays. Others flipped food-filled plates and tables onto the floor. Almost 100 students broke chairs and other furniture.Commons, the main dining hall on campus, became a “slippery, sloshing pigpen,” according to the Yale Daily News. Soon, nearly 300 students flooded Commons, throwing metal trays across the hall while policemen and dining managers watched grimly nearby. “Support the Yale workers,” they chanted, doing all they could to halt Commons’s services. That day, over 1,000 service and maintenance employees at Yale, part of Local 35 of the Federation of …

Raymond E. Jackson And Segregation In The American Federation Of Musicians, 1900-1944, Lance Boos

History Theses

In 1944, the American Federation of Musicians abolished the practice of subsidiary local chapters, granting autonomous charters to the twelve chapters of African American musicians who were bound to a white parent chapter in their respective cities. While most black musicians in the AFM were organized in “separate but equal” chapters, those under subsidiary status were obligated to pay dues to the white local but generally had no access to union offices, voting rights in union elections, control over booking of and payment for jobs, or representation at the national convention. This change was prompted by years of advocacy by …

Ways We Remember: Rethinking Symbols Of Italian American History And Imagining Alternative Narratives, Kathryn N. Anastasi

American Studies Honors Projects

My project re-examines dominant historical narratives of Christopher Columbus and assimilation of southern Italian immigrants to the United States. Arguing that such narratives partly result from historic anxiety surrounding southern Italians’ unstable whiteness, I challenge masculinist, white-washed histories by centering and contextualizing a history of Italian immigrant garment worker and labor leader Angela Bambace (1898-1975). By weaving my own exploration of my Italian immigrant ancestors’ pasts throughout, I ultimately encourage other white descendants of European immigrants to explore their histories in a critical and loving way that "resurrects" histories without sanctifying historical figures or their white descendants to racial innocence.

Catholic Labor Education And The Association Of Catholic Trade Unionists. Instructing Workers To Christianize The Workplace, Paul Lubienecki Ph.D.

Journal of Catholic Education

This article analyzes the effect of the American Catholic Church, through its program of specialized labor education, on the growth and development of organized labor in the twentieth century. With the proclamation of Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, he requested that the Church complete the work began by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 with his landmark social encyclical Rerum Novarum.

However, the American interpretation and utilization of the social encyclicals varied from their intended European meaning. The cumulative effect of these two encyclicals was support for the workers’ rights to organize and create Christian labor associations. From …

Texas Runaway Slave Digital Project - Final Report To The Summerlee Foundation, Kyle Ainsworth

Librarian and Staff Publications

The SFASU Foundation, on behalf of the East Texas Research Center (ETRC), Ralph W. Steen Library, Stephen F. Austin State University (SFA), was awarded a Summerlee Foundation grant to research slavery in Texas through the lens of newspaper advertisements, articles and capture notices for runaway slaves. A $10,000 grant from the Summerlee Foundation supported the project. The ETRC hired six student assistants for 780 hours of digital research.

The students looked at newspaper issues from 1835-1865 in the collection of the Texas Digital Newspaper Program. The researchers reviewed 62.5 percent (4,735) of the available content, found 1,116 records and input …

“...When We Fight Back”: Attempting Social Reconstructions Of The Great Industrial Class War In The United States From 1870-1930, Daniel Park

History - Master of Arts in Teaching

I. Synthesis Essay………………………………2

II. Bibliography…………………………………..29

III. Textbook Critique…………………………….30

IV. Primary Documents and Headnotes……….37

Constructing The World's Largest Prison: Understanding Identity By Examining Labor, Hubert J. Gibson

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

ABSTRACT

A Civil War prison camp operated by the Confederacy known as Camp Lawton was once considered the largest prison in the world. This label was attributed to the fact that Lawton’s stockade enclosed 42 acres. The historical record does not have a clear picture of who built it. Newspaper interviews claim the construction was carried out by 500 impressed slave laborers and 300 Union POWs, but these lack the credibility of official orders. Unfortunately, many Confederate documents were lost when Sherman’s army came through Millen, GA. This study archaeologically examines construction techniques utilized for building stockades in an effort …

Confederate Richmond: A City's Call To Arms, Tucker L. Modesitt

Theses and Dissertations

This work mainly focuses on putting the laborers of the Richmond Armory and the Tredegar Iron Works into the context of Civil War Richmond by focusing on their skills, backgrounds, and loyalties throughout the conflict. It highlights the similarities and differences between the two institutions and the legacies that they left behind in the years following the war. It also sheds light on some of the problems facing the Confederacy during the course of the war and its struggle to procure arms.

Labor In A Hopeless Land: The Daughters Of Charity And Hansen's Disease Patients At The Louisiana Leper Home, 1896-1926, Reagan Laiche

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The Miracle of Carville, as the late 1930’s and 1940’s have been called, is considered the pivotal point for those isolated with leprosy at the National Leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana. Scholars, researchers and folklorists alike have grappled with these decades as providing the environment in which patient reform was cultivated and eventually sown without a serious consideration of the labor and advocacy of the Sisters missioned there.

Understanding the multiple roles of the Sisters at the Louisiana Leper Home, those of home makers, care takers and patient advocates, provides the foundation for the patient reforms won during the Miracle of …

Case Study Two: Jewish Time Jump: New York, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Gottlieb presents an early case study of his mobile augmented reality game Jewish Time Jump: New York design on the ARIS platform for the iPhone and iPad (iOS). The game is set on-location in Washington Square Park in New York city. Players in 5th-7th grade take on the role of time-traveling reporters, landing on site on the eve of the Uprising of 20,000, the largest women-led strike in U.S. History. Based on their GPS location they receive media from over 100 years in the past, interactive with digital characters as they work to gather a story for the fictional Jewish …

Revolutionary Decade: Reflections On The 1960s, Booth Library

Booth Library Programs

Photo galleries and supporting exhibits can be found on the REVOLUTIONARY DECADE exhibit page.

Exhibit Dates

This exhibit was displayed at Booth Library September 9 - November 20, 2014

The Influences Of The Musselman Family, Yifei Zhang

Student Publications

For almost a century, the Musselman family has had huge influences on Adams County, PA. Many of those contributions are unknown by people today. So, based on the research of the Musselman Canning Company and the two Musselman Foundations, this paper is a study of the impacts the Musselman family has had on others and how it has achieved that influence. The main primary sources include the company’s publication, The Processor, the articles on local newspaper, and the collections in the Special Collection in Gettysburg College’s Musselman Library.