Highlights Archives
Labor Day: Society Preserves Labor Legacy
While the first Monday in September is today seen as the last long weekend of summer fun, the commemoration of Labor Day began more than 100 years ago by America's labor unions as a testament to the social and economic achievements of working men and women.
Wisconsin workers and reformers played an instrumental part in the development and growth of the labor movement in the United States, and since the late 19th century, the Wisconsin Historical Society has collected material about working people.
Labor activists in Wisconsin helped to enact groundbreaking social policies like workers' compensation and unemployment insurance that became models for similar laws in other states. The study of labor history itself also began in Wisconsin when University of Wisconsin economist John R. Commons began to document the history of work and labor in America at the turn of the 20th century.
Beginning in the 1890s, the Wisconsin Historical Society began actively collecting historical materials related to labor and to working-class people, one of the first institutions in the country to do so. As a result, the Society's library-archives division contains a vast array of labor history resources that is particularly strong in the areas of working-class political, radical and reform movements, the 19th-century origins of Marxism in the U.S., worker education, labor economics and history, and the trade union movement. While our digital collection Turning Points in Wisconsin History has made a selection of these labor resources available online, the majority of published and unpublished material is accessible at our headquarters in Madison and at the regional network of Area Research Centers based on University of Wisconsin System campuses. The Society's library boasts an unparalleled collection of labor newspapers, periodicals and pamphlets, while the archives includes such noteworthy collections as those of the Socialist Labor Party, Socialist Congressman Victor Berger, UW economist John R. Commons, and the records of the American Federation of Labor as well as 11 other international unions.
Library collections are searchable through the Library Catalog (formerly MadCat), the online catalog of the University of Wisconsin. Arcat is the online catalog to the holdings of the Archives division. Images of Wisconsin workers can also be found online in Wisconsin Historical Images.
:: Posted September 2, 2005
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