Blogs

The 32nd annual North American Labor History Conference (NALHC) will take place October 21-23, 2010 on the campus of Wayne State University. In 1979, a committee representing Wayne State's History Department, the Walter P. Reuther Library, and other parts of the University formed to address the growth of labor history as a field of scholarship. The result was the first NALHC in October 1979.  read more »

Like other organizations, labor unions and the archives that house their material operate in and are shaped by history. That history is largely informed by the records that labor archives receive from labor unions, the “symbiotic relationship” between the two, as Michael Nash reminds us, and the extent to which they are made available to and used by researchers. This is the message found within How to Keep Union Records. Edited by Michael Nash with selections by a cadre of labor archivists, the book is intended as much for labor archivists requiring guidance as it is for unions seeking ways to manage their records and ensure that their legacy lives into the future.  read more »

Next month metropolitan Detroit authors and frequent Reuther Library researchers Steve Babson, Dave Riddle, and David Elsila are releasing their book The Color of Law: Ernie Goodman, Detroit, and the Struggle for Labor and Civil Rights, which uses information garnered from collections held at the Reuther.

We have many records and manuscript collections that reflect how the local government, legal system, and organizations have addressed the intersection of civil rights, race, and the law in metro Detroit.  read more »

Few cities are more closely tied to the labor movement than Detroit. From the outset, Labor Day in Detroit was about worker demonstration, which typically took the form of a parade. The city's first Labor Day celebration was held on August 16, 1884 in Recreation Park and attracted 50,000 spectators. The earliest Labor Day image in the Reuther's collections shows Randolph Street in downtown Detroit circa 1890s (pictured below).  read more »