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Chicago's Labor Trail: Labor History as Collaborative Public History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2009

Jeffrey Helgeson
Jeffrey Helgeson
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Chicago
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Extract

Historians of labor and working-class life face a powerful public amnesia; they seek to recover a past of struggle for economic security and dignity at work that is all too often obscured or even suppressed by consensual accounts of American history. Public historians necessarily work against similar lapses in popular memory. Historian Max Page has invoked the oppositional character of public history, which he asserts, “should by all rights be a radical undertaking. For, at its heart,” Page continues, “public history is about bringing history to a wider public, about challenging citizens out of complacency about their past and creating spaces for forgotten stories to be told.”

Type
Reports from the Field
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 76 , Issue 1 , Fall 2009 , pp. 60 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2009

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References

NOTES

1. Page, Max, “Radical Public History in the City,” Radical History Review 79 (2001): 115Google Scholar.

2. Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies, “The Labor Trail: Chicago's History of Working-Class Life and Struggle,” 2005, and www.labortrail.org, 2007. Both projects were made possible by two grants from the Illinois Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Illinois General Assembly.

3. The literature on Chicago's cultural history could nearly fill a library. For works that touch on the issues of class, race, ethnicity, and (im)migration, see Spears, Timothy B., Chicago Dreaming: Midwesterners and the City, 1871–1919 (Chicago, 2005)Google Scholar; and Mullen, Bill V., Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935–46 (Urbana, 1999)Google Scholar.

4. Significantly, Chicago's role as a site of labor history in textbooks is generally regarded as the scene of labor's violent defeat. Green, James, “Why Teach Labor History,” OAH Magazine of History 2 (Winter 1997): 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Anyon, Jean, “Ideology and American Textbooks,” Harvard Educational Review 49 (August 1979): 373CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. For more information on the ILHS, including a history of the organization and a list of ILHS history guidebooks, see: http://www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs/.

6. Gorn, Eliott J., Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York, 2002), 54Google Scholar.

7. For updates on the Congress Hotel strike, see: http://www.congresshotelstrike.info/.

8. Steelworkers Fight Back: Inland's Local Union 1010 and the Sadlowski/Balanoff Campaigns: Rank and File Insurgency in the Calumet Region During the 1970s (Gary, 2000); and Bigott, Joseph C., From Cottage to Bungalow: Houses and the Working Class in Metropolitan Chicago, 1869–1929 (Chicago, 2001)Google Scholar.

9. For more on the Calumet Heritage Project, see: http://www.calumetheritage.org/calumet-industrial-heritage-project.html.

10. These essays and more will soon be published with hyperlinks to the relevant map locations as part of a new “Student Forum” section of www.labortrail.org.