U.S. History

The Upjohn Institute serves as the data repository for many research and evaluation projects sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Find current and historical (back to the 1960s) statistics on women in the labor force.

"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."

The government-sponsored Bracero Program was the temporary importation of workers from Mexico to aid the American agricultural economy. More than 4 million Mexican workers left their families behind and came to work in the fields of California. This collection includes multiple collections, featuring work, transportation, and more.

The USCIS History Library holds several photographs of the Mexican Agricultural Labor Program, commonly called the “Bracero Program,” dating from 1951-1964. The photographs provide an interesting firsthand glimpse at how INS inspected and admitted Braceros on Mexican border.

More than 1700 images, mostly associated with the Bracero Program (initiated in 1942) from the Smithsonian Institution. Beautiful photographs, problematic metadata.

Photographs focusing on children, showing workers, working and living conditions, and educational settings in the United States between 1908 and 1924. Images depict working conditions in agriculture, home labor, street trades, and...

Collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance. The first phase of this project focused on books published between 1850 and 1925 and a small number of journals.

Letterpress books containing correspondence of Samuel Gompers, and William Green, presidents of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and other officials including James Duncan, Gabriel Edmonston, Frank K. Foster, and John McBride....

A selection of items drawn from the Seattle office of the Industrial Workers of the World labor organization. Includes pamphlets, leaflets and correspondence documenting the I.W.W.'s involvement in the Centralia Tragedy of 1919 and general publications from the national I.W.W. organization.

Items documenting labor's perspective on the events of the 1916 Everett Massacre. The materials are drawn from the Seattle Union Record and the writings of Anna Louise Strong, among others.

Primary source accounts by the UFW volunteers who built the movement.

Includes: California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO: Proceedings and Publications; California and West Coast Industrial Relations; Collective Bargaining Agreements; and more.

Justice for Janitors changed the lives of thousands of people. Since 2010, at Georgetown we’ve been collecting the stories of DC Justice for Janitors—union activists, politicians, employers, community leaders, and janitors themselves.

The Labor Archives of Washington State has hundreds of photographs and digitized documents showing workers, industrial settings, strikes and union activities, civil rights campaigns, and more. This portal highlights items from those collections.

This project has made hundreds of primary textual and visual resources relating to Pacific Northwest labor history more accessible to the public. Material includes information on The I.W.W. in the Pacific Northwest, Strikes, Anti-Labor Reactions and Labor Espionage, and more.

Historical images from Western United States and the Pacific Northwest region covering political and social topics such as women's issues, labor and government, and ethnic groups with special emphasis on the Japanese internment camps in the Northwest during World War II.

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 a historic relationship to the region. With more that 3,000 digital facsimiles of buttons, photographs, programs, and more.

An exploration of women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression.

Trained to be a Protestant minister, Bob Fitch's career as a photojournalist began in 1965 when he joined the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s organization. In 1968, activist photographer Bob Fitch renewed his commitment to document nonviolent peace and social justice leaders and movements, traveling to Delano, California to photograph Cesar Chavez and members of the United Farm Workers union.

Images, primarily from the 1880s to the 1940s, in an ever-growing digital collection of photographs documenting the workers of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.