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The Labor History Resources in the University of Iowa Libraries (UIL), the State Historical Society of Iowa/Iowa City (SHSI), and the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library (HHPL), all located within 12 miles of one another in east central Iowa, have long been known as a major repository of source materials concerning the politics of American agriculture, Iowa history, and the Hoover Presidency and Commerce Secretariat. UIL sources mentioned here. Pertinent oral history collections at UIL are the Communications Workers of America-University of Iowa Oral History Project, and the Quad Cities Oral History Project, along with a 1936 typescript history of the area's labor and radical movements by R.F. McNabney. The SHSI holds a magnificent and in some ways unparalleled collection which, due to staff shortages in recent years, remains largely unprocessed and therefore somewhat difficult to access. The HHPL, opened to scholars in 1966, holds the Hoover papers, totaling some 2450 linear feet, and the papers of more than 100 of Hoover's associates and contemporaries, totaling over 2200 linear feet.

The Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Walter P. Reuther Library at the Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, was established in 1960 to collect and preserve the records of the American labor movement, with special emphasis upon industrial unionism and related social, economic and political reform movements in the U.S., especially those relating to workers. Later, in 1970, the scope of the Archives was expanded to include urbanization, especially relating to Detroit and southeastern Michigan. The majority of the archival collections relate to the period after 1920, though some collections like those of the Industrial Workers of the World, the American Federation of Teachers, and the personal papers of labor leaders date back to the turn of the century. Archives. From its beginning in 1960, the Archives has adopted a vertical collecting policy for union records. This vertical collecting policy differs sharply from the acquisitions policy of many archives that concentrate almost solely upon key offices of an international union and the personal papers of top union leadership.

The Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress seeks to preserve personal papers and organizational records that document the course of America's national experience. Its more than 10,000 collections with more than 40,000,000 manuscript items touch upon every aspect of American history and culture. Collections containing labor-related material are considerable and constitute a major archive for labor history research. Some of the organizational records in the library includes the American Federation of Labor Letterbooks, American Friends Service Committee Work Camp Diary, Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Association of Railway Postal Clerks, National Child Labor Committee, National Consumers League, National Women's Trade Union League of America, and People's Legislative Service. Some of the personal papers included in the library are of Henry J. Allen, former governor of Kansas, Otto S. Beyer, a consulting engineer and labor-management relations specialist, Warren K. Billings, a labor militant, William E. Borah, a former U.S. Senator from Idaho, and Andrew Carnegie, a labor activist in the late 19th century.

The article presents information about the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), which has, in the past two years, significantly added to already existing archival collections with the addition of several important groups of labor-related materials. In 1986 due to the expansion of its present office structure and the creation of an in-house computer center, the Rochester and Pittsburgh (R&P) Coal Co. donated many of its corporate archives to IUP. This collection, consisting of 420 linear feet, constitutes one of the most complete groups of coal company records in the East. Probably the most significant group of papers consists of the presidential files of R&P and of its several predecessor companies. Lucius Waterman Robinson left papers rich in labor history and the industrial heritage of Western Pennsylvania. B.M. Clark and his son, Heath S. Clark, both served as president during periods of industrial expansion and labor-management strife, and these are reflected in their surviving correspondence. The R&P collection also contains a unique group of early financial ledgers which document the founding of the company's 17 mining towns, beginning with the parent company's incorporation in 1881.

The article presents several news related to various universities in the U.S. Indiana University of Pennsylvania has acquired the United Mine Workers of America District 2 Collection. The collection consists of almost 400 boxes and includes papers associated with the presidencies of John Brophy and James Mark and executive files including presidential correspondence, injunctions and other documents. The Knight Library at the University of Oregon has opened the Records of the International Woodworkers of America to researchers. The records, which span from 1936 to 1987 and till nearly 600 linear feet, consist primarily of correspondence, minutes, proceedings, negotiation files, expired contracts, legal and financial documents and officer and departmental records. In addition to the union's basic activities, such as organizing, negotiations, litigation, and strikes, the collection documents the conflict between the red bloc and white bloc forces in the union during the 1940s and 1950s. Papers from the presidency of Keith Johnson deal with Canadian softwood lumber imports, national health insurance, labor law reform, affirmative action, occupational safety and health and other issues.

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 labor history resources at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin are, in part, the result of the first systematic attempt to document the rise of working-class movements and trade unionism in the U.S. In the early 1890s, when Richard T. Ely joined the University of Wisconsin faculty in Madison, Wisconsin, the Society began assisting him in gathering source material for the study of the labor movement. When, in 1904, Ely formed the American Bureau of Industrial Research and brought John R. Commons to Madison, the Society began collecting labor material on a systematic basis. From the 1890s to the present, those collecting for the Society have had a very broad definition of the labor movement, including not only trade unions but also anarchism, communism, cooperation, socialism, utopianism, and other working-class movements. Society research collections are divided functionally into three major areas, Library, including newspapers, pamphlets, books; Archives, including organizational records, personal papers, and Wisconsin governmental records; and Visual and Sound Archives, including photographs, posters and other graphics.

Several international unions which have national offices in the greater Washington, D.C. area have sought assistance from the University of Maryland at College Park, the state's land grant institution, in preserving their archival records. A combination of developments also contributed significantly to the creation of a labor archives program at College Park, the formal establishment of what is now called the Historical Manuscripts and Archives Department in 1972 and the commencement of the Samuel Gompers Papers Project at the University campus in 1973. The first major archival collection to arrive at College Park was the records of the Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers of America (IUMSWA) in 1967. The archives located at College Park provide in-depth documentation on the origins of the union, its contact with civilian and military agencies during World War II, labor and race relations during the war, and the union's efforts to combat the decline of the shipbuilding industry during the late 1940s and 1950s.

The article presents information about the George Meany Memorial Archives, for which a new building was dedicated on the campus of the George Meany Center for Labor Studies in Silver Spring, Maryland, ending the formative years of the Archives and creating a national center for the study of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). The Meany Archives serves as the official archives of the AFL-CIO and has defined as its collecting scope the records of the federation and its predecessor organizations, the constitutional trade and industrial departments, affiliated institutes and selected personal papers of AFL-CIO officers and staff. It is the plan of the Archives to eventually become a national clearing house for information about labor-related archival collections through participation in the Chadwick-Healey Inc. micropublication "The National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States" and through cooperation with the "Labor Archives Roundtable of the Society of American Archivists."

The Ohio Historical Society (OHS) began the Ohio Labor History Project in 1975 to locate, inventory, acquire, preserve, and provide access to labor union records and personal papers of Ohio labor leaders and to conduct oral history interviews. Initial funding came from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ohio American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the Labor Education Research Services of the Ohio State University at Columbus and OHS. Since 1979 the Society's manuscripts department, through continuing support from the Ohio General Assembly, has expanded the collections and conducted extensive research into the history of Ohio labor. The majority of collections at OHS are of local unions in the central Ohio area, but district and regional headquarters for many internationals are located in Columbus and larger central labor bodies also are included. The Ohio AFL-CIO Records for the years 1922-1984 cover nearly all aspects of organized labor in the state, including material on the important defeat of the right-to-work campaign in 1958. The Columbus-Franklin County AFL-CIO, Newark Area AFL-CIO Council, and the Columbus-Franklin County Building and Construction Trades Council records also are at OHS.

The Joseph A. Beirne Memorial in Washington D.C. was built in the memory of Joseph A. Beirne, the founding father of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), who passed away after more than 30 years in the vanguard of the labor movement. The union started a three-part program, including an archives, museum, and written history, as a testament to CWA's many achievements under his administration. The archives was initiated in 1986, when CWA hired an archivist to organize the Joseph A. Beirne Memorial Archives. The original scope of the project encompassed primarily the processing of the Beirne papers and the renovation of an area in the CWA headquarters building into an archival facility. Since then, however, the role of the archives has expanded considerably to include the preservation of the important records of the entire union and the establishment of an oral history project, which will update an earlier project conducted by the University of Iowa's Center for Labor and Management between 1968 and 1972. The Beirne archives consists of six major collections, which include records relating to the administrations of Joseph Beirne and his successor, Glenn Watts, as well as to the National Federation of Telephone Workers and the International Typographical Union.

The American labor movement has been heavily Catholic for more than a century, both in its rank and file composition and top leadership. From its inception in 1948 the Department of Archives and Manuscripts at the Catholic University of America, Washington D.C., has therefore devoted a substantial portion of its holdings to collections in the field of American labor history. Many of these collections were acquired with the help of clerical faculty who had themselves been important figures in early 20th century social reform. The records of the National Conference of Catholic Charities, the Catholic Interracial Council of New York, and the National Council of Catholic Women/National Council of Catholic Men contain much material on Church welfare work, Catholic social programs, and efforts to influence government social and economic policy. The National Catholic War Council undertook extensive social surveys among the Catholic urban population with particular emphasis on the conditions of women and child laborers, extent of immigrant citizenship and health conditions at home and in the armed service camps. The John Brophy papers is the most consistently useful of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) holdings. The Philip Murray Collection covers the period 1943 to 1952 when Murray was simultaneously president of the CIO and United Steelworkers of America.

The establishment of archival institutions whose primary objective is to collect and preserve the records of labor unions, labor organizations and the personal papers of labor leaders and workers is a relatively recent development in the U.S. and Canada. The National Archives and Record Administration established in 1934 has extensive public records relating to government and labor, as do a number of state archival programs. However, for the most part, up to 1950, collections relating to the labor movement were not given priority by the major archival institutions which concentrated their collecting priorities on the "white male elite" in the U.S. The 1960s witnessed a change in this emphasis, resulting in the establishment of new archival programs devoted to specialized subject areas such as immigration, social welfare, women, minorities, native American Indians, and urban America. Several international unions have established archival programs to preserve their own records, rather than placing them in an archival institution. In addition to new labor archives programs, existing archives have expanded their labor holdings since 1982.

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.

The article presents information about the UE/Labor Archives (UELA), a division of the Archives of Industrial Society at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The UE/Labor Archives was established in 1975. It is the official repository for the records of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) and its geographic districts in the U.S. It is also the home for dozens of other collections about labor in Western Pennsylvania, including labor union records, corporate employment and personnel files, the records of labor attorneys, labor activists and organizations associated with the labor movement. The UE collection is also the repository for the records of all cur- rent UE districts in the U.S. The records of Districts 2, 6, 7, and 11 are open, and those of District 1 are partially opened. Two closely related collections in the UELA are the papers of Thomas Quinn, a former UE activist and current director of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Mediation and Conciliation, and Margaret Darin Stasik, a former UE activist and staff member.