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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 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 article focuses on the battle between the trade unions and the Knights of Labor during 1881-1896 with the emphasis on carpenters. The fifteen years of strife in the Washington labor movement arose not over the broader concepts of wage and hour goals versus cooperativism, but over the more immediate problem of a dues hike. Personal antagonisms between the local rank and file, as well as hatred toward the BCJA Secretary, accentuated the problem. The experiences of the Washington carpenters offers an insight into the workings of the Knights-trade union conflict on one local level. Washington carpenters split in 1886 over an internal Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (BCJA) dispute concerning the scale of the benefit system. Yet, whether Washington carpenters chose to stay in the BCJA or to join the Knights, they remained trade unionists devoted to trade union goals and tactics. Personal antagonisms arising out of the split made later cooperation difficult. Although on the national level, the BCJA was one of the most successful of the AFL unions, the Washington split prohibited the Brotherhood from controlling the carpentry trade in the nation's capital for over a decade.

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.