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Additional resources for this issue of History Now
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Labor Day
For information on the background of the first Labor Day
observance in New York in 1882 and President Cleveland's
approval of the concept as a public holiday in 1894, try
these articles:
Grossman, Jonathan. "Who Is the Father of Labor Day?"
Labor History 14, no. 4 (1973): 612-23. Presents
the claims of Matthew Maguire and Peter McGuire for
this honor.
Hunt, Richard P. "The First Labor Day." American
Heritage 33, no. 5 (1982): 109-12.
Kazin, Michael, and Steven J. Ross. "America's Labor
Day: The Dilemma of a Worker's Celebration." Journal
of American History 78, no. 4 (1992): 1294-1323.
Evolution of Labor Day since the 1880s.
Murolo, Priscilla, and A.B. Chitty. From the Folks
Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History
of Labor in the United States. (New York: New Press,
2001). Very informal, but with good illustrations.
And these websites:
For material on Peter McGuire, see this fine page from the Carpenters Union Website:
http://www.carpenters.org/history/pj.html
About.com provides a useful site on origins of Labor Day (if you can stand all of the pop-up ads):
http://usgovinfo.about.com/bllabor.htm
The "Newshour" website of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) has a brief but helpful discussion of President Cleveland's proclamation of the first Labor Day:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/september96/labor_day_9-2.html
And the Detroit News' website has a marvelous section on the holiday, based on the story "How Labor Won Its Day" by News staffer Patricia K. Zacharias. Don't forget to click on the "More Photos" button on this page; the images that follow are great!
http://info.detnews.com/history/story/index.cfm?id=150&category=business
Good general histories of the nineteenth-century American
labor movement are:
Foner, Philip Sheldon. History of the Labor Movement
in the United States. (New York: International Publishers,
1947-1999). A multi-volume work, with different volumes
published in different years. From Googling, I think
this is the case, though I'm not positive.
Mink, Gwendolyn. Old Labor and New Immigrants in
American Political Development: Union, Party, and State,
1875-1920. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1986).
Nicholson, Philip Yale. Labor's Story in the United
States. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2004).
For material on specific labor unions of the day, try:
Buhle, Paul, and Nicole Schulman. Wobblies! : A Graphic
History of the Industrial Workers of the World.
(London: Verso, 2005). Excellent images.
Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall Be All: A History of the
Industrial Workers of the World. (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press: c1988).
Fink, Leon. Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of
Labor and American Politics. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, c1983.
Gompers, Samuel. The Samuel Gompers Papers. Stuart
B. Kaufman et al., eds. Nine volumes to date. (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press: c1986 - ). This series
serves as a documentary history of the founding of the
American Federation of Labor as well as a record of
Gompers' life.
Greene, Julie. Pure and Simple Politics: The American
Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881-1917.
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press: 1998).
Kimeldorf, Howard. Battling for American Labor: Wobblies,
Craft Workers, and the Making of the Union Movement.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Phelan, Craig. Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly
and the Knights of Labor. (Westport, CT.: Greenwood
Press, 2000).
Renshaw, Patrick. The Wobblies: The Story of the
IWW and Syndicalism in the United States. (Chicago:
Ivan R. Dee, 1999). With a new preface by the author
and an updated bibliography.
You'll have wide choices of books, documents, and websites dealing with specific examples of labor unrest in the 1880s and 1890s.
You might want to start with this source, mounted at the website of the Seattle Longshoremen's Union on "Mayday, 1886: The Eight-Hour Movement":
http://www.ilwu19.com/history/mayday.htm
The bomb explosion at the May 3, 1886, rally in Chicago's
Haymarket Square and the controversial trials that followed
have been the subject of articles, books, songs, and,
of course, websites. Here are just a few books you may
want to try:
Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. (Princeton.:
Princeton University Press, 1986). The standard work
on the subject.
Glenn, Robert W. The Haymarket Affair: An Annotated
Bibliography. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993).
Roediger, Dave, and Franklin Rosemont, eds. Haymarket
Scrapbook. (Chicago: C.H. Kerr: 1986). Fine compilation
of images.
On the Internet:
The "Haymarket" section of EdSitement's "Industrial Age in America" lesson plan has excellent links to Internet, video, and print resources:
http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=430
The Chicago Historical Society's "Haymarket Affair Digital Collection" site has an excellent narrative, bibliography, links, and some great samples of Haymarket images at the Society. Be sure to investigate all of the corners of this site:
http://www.chicagohistory.org/hadc/intro.html
The "Dramas of Haymarket," a cooperative venture of Northwestern University and the Chicago Historical Society, is a lively interactive addition:
http://www.chicagohistory.org/dramas/index.htm
And PBS's "American Experience" series has a helpful lesson plan on the Haymarket Square riots:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/chicago/peopleevents/e_haymarket.html
The Pullman strike of 1894 triggered the nationwide 1894
railroad strike, with an outcome that persuaded President
Cleveland to approve adoption of Labor Day as a holiday.
Try these books for the story:
Lindsey, Almont. The Pullman Strike: The Story of
a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labor Upheaval.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
Schneirov, Richard et al., eds. The Pullman Strike
and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics.
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
On the Internet, you'll want to look at the Illinois Labor History Society's "Parable of Pullman":
http://www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs/pullpar.htm
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