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In November 1966, at the Southern Historical Association (SHA) convention in Memphis, Tennessee, some 20 participants organized the Association of the Southern Labor Historians whose purpose was to promote the Southern labor history by encouraging the collection of labor records in various states and tile presentation of scholarly labor papers at annual meetings concurrent with SHA. The author and his friends inquired that no university in the Southwest was soliciting labor records. Professor Dick Shuttee, a labor economist at the University of Texas, Arlington, (UTA) was quite enthusiastic about the idea of an archives. With the permission of the History Department of UTA, the author and his colleagues started the Archives Project with a half-summer salary. About three dozen Texas labor newspapers and newsletters have been collected or have been purchased from other archives' microfilmed holdings. The Texas Labor Archives of UTA is currently the only depository in the Southwest that actively seeks union records.

The State Historical Society of Wisconsin's resources on labor and working class history fall into two broad areas: (1) library collections of books, newspapers, pamphlets, and printed proceedings; and (2) archival holdings of unpublished manuscripts, public records, audio, and visual collections. The second of these two areas is the focus of this brief article. No attempt will be made to provide a comprehensive listing of the Society Archives' labor related collections. Such a descriptive listing is already available in the book "A Guide to Labor Papers in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin." Rather this is an introduction to the collection highlighting its strengths in terms of types of collections time periods, and topical areas within the field of labor and working class history. The State Historical Society of Wisconsin is located on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. The Archives Division holdings are open to all researchers upon presentation of identification. Some of the labor collections have been microfilmed and may be purchased or borrowed on interlibrary loan.

The Southern Labor Archives at Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, was the second labor archive established as a result of the activities of the Association of Southern Labor Historians. This group of historians concerned about the lack of attention paid to the southern working class on the part of labor historians, developed during the 1966 meeting of the Southern Historical Association with the purpose of stimulating study of the southern trade union movement by collecting union records and presenting papers on labor history at meetings concurrent with those of the Southern Historical Association. Dr. George Green of the University of Texas (UT) at Arlington, Texas, returned home from this meeting and began a series of conversations with UT faculty and administrators, as well as Texas labor leaders. These discussions led to the creation in 1967 of the Texas Labor Archives at UT. The Southern Labor Archives is a very young repository. The Archives seeks, however, to become a major regional and national research resource by concentrating its efforts on documenting the development of the labor movement in the South.