[Martin Luther King Jr.] [Chicago] King Jr., Martin Luther. Western Union telegram sent May 19, 1966, supporting the Independent Union of Public Aid Employees during the Chicago Freedom Movement. The message documents King’s public alignment with labor activism and welfare reform campaigns during his Northern civil rights organizing in Chicago.....

[Slavery] [Cuba] Spanish colonial slave sale manuscript recording the transfer of thirty-eight enslaved individuals in Cuba in 1875, materializing the sheer scale and organization of enslaved labor within the island’s plantation economy during the final decade before abolition. The document enumerates a large group of enslaved people, including multiple family.....

Elk Creek Mining Company photograph album documenting coal extraction, transportation networks, and company town life in Milner, Colorado during the early twentieth century. The photographs record operations of one of the principal coal producers in Routt County at a time when Colorado coal fueled railroads and industrial markets throughout the.....

[New Deal][Labor] Civilian Conservation Corps photo archive, circa 1930s, documenting Black, white, and racially integrated labor units under the New Deal, with particular relevance to African American labor history, federal relief policy, and the administration of public works programs. These images provide direct visual evidence of how the CCC, one.....

Steve Rose's photographic coverage of demonstrations, strike activity, broadcast spaces, and police control in New York City and Washington, D.C., circa 1969–1971, with dissent moving through street assembly, underground and movement media, institutional protest, and municipal enforcement. Rose, active in New York documentary photography during the early 1970s, photographed activists.....

Cantonese Chinese migrant hospital certificate from Havana in 1869, recording the death and burial administration of a man identified in manuscript as “natural de Asia, provincia de Canton” during the height of Chinese contract migration to Cuba. Evidence collected from 1,176 Chinese laborers by the 1874 Cuba Commission identified 998.....

Chinese migrant hospital certificate from Havana in 1869, documenting the admission and death of a man identified in manuscript as a native of China within the Real Hospital de Caridad de San Felipe y Santiago. Issued while Chinese contract labor supplied Cuba with a large migrant workforce under a system.....

[Mining][Labor][Steel] Iron mining photographs of Inland Steel Company workers at Greenwood Mine, southwest of Ishpeming, Michigan, documenting the labor system that linked Upper Peninsula ore extraction to steel production in Chicago during the central decades of twentieth century industrial expansion. Greenwood Mine gave the Inland Steel Company, one of Chicago's.....

[Federal Agricultural Policy][Environmental Management][USDA] United States Department of Agriculture Farm Security Administration records documenting federal agricultural credit, debt restructuring, and subsistence planning for a farmer in Cullohwee, North Carolina, 1940s, significant for providing direct documentation of New Deal rural relief programs aimed at aiding farms impacted by the Dust Bowl.....

African American occupational photo archive depicting Black wage earners across the expanding urban economy of the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, recording the breadth of employment available to Black workers during the decades between the Great Migration and the Second World War. As millions of African Americans relocated.....

Ford Lima Engine Plant photo archive documenting one Ford's Ohio engine factory from steel-frame construction through twenty years of production and UAW strike activity. Ford opened the Lima plant in 1957 on farmland north of Lima, Ohio, producing six-cylinder engines for its postwar lineup and reaching its five millionth six-cylinder.....

Bookbinding factory image archive documenting women’s labor inside an early twentieth century printing and bindery plant, showing how blank book and stationery manufacture had been divided into specialized departments by the 1900s. Caption labels on the versos identify the coordinated production chain through printing, cutting and trimming, office and accounting.....

[Women's Labor][Union Organizing] Women telephone workers on strike press photo archive documenting labor organization, picket lines, arrests, and union settlement efforts in New York, Brooklyn, Chicago, Seattle, St. Louis, and Cleveland, 1945-1950. The images illustrate the postwar labor conflict in the American telephone industry as women workers fought for better.....