Blogs

The folksinger and activist Pete Seeger died Monday, January 27, 2014 at the age of 94, bringing to an end a career that lasted from the Great Depression to the twenty-first century. His lifelong engagement with culture and politics, and his deep commitment to the labor movement, brought him into continual contact with the rank and file of unionized American workers. In 1939, when Seeger was 20 years old, he worked in the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song as an assistant to the musicologist Alan Lomax, and it seems fitting that this onetime archivist is so well represented in the archives and manuscripts of the Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs. No fewer than twelve collections in the Reuther Library collections include correspondence, recordings, or other first-hand evidence of his career.  read more »

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 required that women be paid the same amount as men when performing the same work. This milestone, however, did not go far enough in protecting women from wage discrimination. This 1963 law promoted equal pay for equal work, but beginning in the 1970s, advocates for women’s rights waged a series of legislative and collective bargaining battles to provide equal pay for comparable work as well.  read more »

At the start of 2014, the Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs would like to take a moment to remember the year that's just ended and revisit the content that was added to our website in 2013. It was a banner year for the Reuther's blog, with more visits, visitors, and pageviews than in any previous year.  read more »

December 24th, 2013 marks the 100th anniversary of one of the great tragedies of the early twentieth-century: the Italian Hall disaster of the 1913-1914 Copper Country Strike.  read more »