Labor history and public history have had a long relationship in the United States, as James Green argues in Taking History to Heart, dating back to Progressive-era historians like Mary Ritter and Charles A. Beard. Labor historians like Phillip Foner, who identified with the “Old Left,” made labor history public history through ties to labor organizations and the Communist Party. Then, during the 1960s, historians identified with the “New Left” and inspired by E.P. Thompson, worked to extend social history and working-class history “from the bottom up” beyond the confines of the academy, even as they shifted their focus from the institutional histories of unions and political parties, to make the history of “ordinary people” and “everyday life” public history. The organization of history workshops and the proliferation of oral history projects reflect the ways in which historians of the working class made their practices public history in new ways during the 1960s and 1970s while expanding the sphere of both “the public” and “labor” to include histories of women, gender and patriarchy, and ethnic and racial minorities.

In 1915 officers of the United Mine Workers of America purchased forty acres of land north of the Ludlow, Colorado train depot on land where a tent colony had sheltered coal miners and their families during the 1913–1914 southern Colorado coal strike. Three years later, the union dedicated a memorial of Vermont granite on the site in memory of those who died there April 20, 1914, in the Ludlow Massacre.

Labor history in UK museums is constantly in a state of change. A hundred-year-old tradition of displaying and interpreting the history of the common people has seen a shift from the folk life museum to a much more all-encompassing model. The academic trend for and acceptance of working-class history began this process, and museums followed, albeit at a much slower pace. Young curators actively involved in the History Workshop, Oral History, and Women's History movements brought their new philosophies into the museum sphere. This internally driven change in museums has been matched with demand for change from above. Museums have been given a central role in the current Labour government's wide-ranging strategies to promote an understanding of diversity, citizenship, cultural identity, and lifelong learning as part of a broader social inclusion policy. The zenith of this plan would be a museum devoted to British national history, though whether this will take place is yet to be seen. The transformation of the People's History Museum makes an interesting case study. The museum, originally an institution on the fringes of academic labor history and actively outside the museum community, is now at the forefront of labor history display, interpretation, textile conservation, and working-class historical research.

The Labour Movement Archives and Library in Stockholm (Arbetarrörelsens arkiv och bibliotek, or ARAB) has been and still is one of the more important nodes of labor history in Sweden. It is well known among academics as well as activists who aim to write movement history. ARAB is financed not only by the Swedish state but also the labor movement to generate new ideas for public labor history. Although there are many units and higher education institutions in Sweden that played a vital role during the 1970s and 1980s, it was probably the research agendas developed by ARAB through seminars and publications that kept the field of labor history a vibrant area of scholarship. The main difference between ARAB and similar institutions is its steady attempt to create spaces where academics—such as historians and social scientists—and activists can meet in order to produce and promote new approaches to labor history. The results and even the success of this work have been built on two institutions at ARAB: the journal Arbetarhistoria, published since 1977, and the research council at ARAB, established in the early 1980s.

The Workers' Museum in Copenhagen was formally inaugurated on April 12, 1982, at a meeting held at the historic Workers' Assembly Hall at Rømersgade in Copenhagen, the prime location near the Royal Gardens and Rosenborg Palace where the museum is located. At that time the museum had a governing board with representatives of The National Museum, The Museum of Copenhagen, The Library and Archives of the Danish Labour Movement, The University of Copenhagen, the National College of the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions (LO), the Friends of the Workers' Museum, and the General Council of the Federation of Trade Unions.

Since its foundation as a central body for British trade unions in 1868, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) has been involved in the creation of the welfare state and public health, education and social services. It has helped to ensure legal rights in employment and an end to discrimination. The Labour Party was established by the TUC so that working people could have their own representatives in Parliament. The TUC has played an important role in international affairs, and union representatives have sat on public bodies and government advisory boards at national and international level.

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.”

The aim of this paper is to analyze how Brazilian trade unions are using social memory as a tool to build up workers' collective identities, in an attempt to fight the fragmentation resulting from the impact of the industrial restructuring of the 1990s. We will draw upon two ongoing programs conducted by the ABC Metal Workers Union (SMABC) and the Oil Workers Union of Brazil's state oil company Petrobras (Sindipetro). The SMABC and Sindipetro have recently been addressing the issue of workers memory with social and public projects. These projects are building up memories, which in spite of being institution-based are also collective, framed by the unions through the use of new types of communication and electronic media.

This paper reflects on the ways in which public labor history and more populist forms of public history have intersected and/or diverged in Australia since the 1970s. By comparing various labor heritage programs and public history interpretation strategies at four redeveloped industrial heritage sites, it examines how both approaches have conceived and represented workers' history and the relationship between past and present, industrialization and deindustrialization. Drawing on the concepts of “nostalgia” and “nostophobia,” the paper suggests that in Australia, labor history/heritage and public history are fundamentally at odds as a result of different political and economic imperatives and the recognition given to workers' collective traditions.

This article examines public representations of slavery on plantation sites devoted to heritage tourism in the Americas. Plantations of various colonial backgrounds are compared in terms of the narratives they present, finding that the history of slavery is largely hidden in Barbados and Puerto Rico, while addressed more explicitly (although still problematically) in the Brazilian and Cuban cases. The article highlights the importance of tour guides and site administrators in the production of histories of slavery and advocates for a more proactive role of historians in the production of public histories of slavery and for more productive and instructive discussions on this thorny topic.

The Hampden Community Archaeology Project (HCAP) is a public archaeology project in a former textile mill neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland. Since the early 1990s the area has been transformed by gentrification. There are now two distinct communities (an older, working-class community and a newer, upper-middle-class community) in the neighborhood. The goal of HCAP is to create a critical public dialogue on issues of class and economic inequality relevant to the current issues facing the neighborhood. After three years of public archaeology in Hampden-Woodberry, the project has achieved some notable successes but has also run up against several roadblocks.

The Durham Miners Gala is an annual event at which the associated branches of the Durham Miners Association carry their banners to a rally held in the city of Durham. The imagery displayed on those banners is representative of the class struggle to create a trade union that would represent and protect individuals and communities against the vagaries of the unbridled capitalism of the nineteenth century. In this way a tradition (and culture) was created not by social or political elites, but developed from ground level to counteract attempts to subsume them into a dominant ideology that saw them as little more than serfs.

Known as the “Dean of Laborlore,” Archie Green, who died this past March, spent much of the twentieth century developing innovative public sector projects at the intersection of labor history, occupational folklore, and cultural studies. In 1971, for example, he helped initiate the Working Americans Exhibition on the Washington Mall of the United States Capitol. Using this exhibit as a starting point, this article examines Green's orientation to publicly presenting labor culture and history. I draw from Robert McCarl's reflections on the challenges of the Working Americans Exhibit and suggest that several life experiences uniquely qualified Archie Green to meet these challenges. Excerpting from interviews with Green, I explore how his childhood in East Los Angeles combined with his years as a union shipwright in San Francisco to develop a strong analysis of, and civic commitment to, public workers' folklife. Central to this commitment is a generative, if uneasy, pairing of syndicalist ideals with pragmatic New Deal-inspired politics. I examine how immigrant Scottish shipwrights, educated in the militant syndicalist and Marxist tradition of John Maclean, particularly influenced Green. Raising questions of historiography, I conclude by suggesting we should view Green's integration of scholarly and public sector work as vitally contributing to the emergent cultural sensibility in New Labor History, folklore, American Studies, and public history in the late 1960s and 1970s.

In The Big Red Songbook, Archie Green, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, and Salvatore Salerno have thoughtfully documented twentieth-century Wobbly song in all of its foot-stompin' glory. In 1909, the Spokane branch of the International Workers of the World compiled twenty-four songs into a little red book called Songs of the Industrial Workers of the World, with the intention “to destroy the old myths that have enslaved us for so long. We will have songs that hold up flaunted wealth and threadbare morality to scorn, songs that lampoon our masters.” The Big Red Songbook documents all the songs of revolt from 1909–1973 (including many that were not included in the first go-round), provides extensive bibliographies and references, a discography, and even a glossary for decoding the “vernacular surrealisms” of hobo-slang and radical industrial unionism.

Taking as a starting point two strikes in colonial Cyprus in the 1930s—the miners' strike in 1936 in which both Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots were involved and the all-female spinners' strike in 1938—this paper looks at how the labor movement deeply transformed the political landscape of the island. In a society closely monitored by British colonial authorities and well acquainted with the Greek-Cypriot claim for Enosis, or the political union of Cyprus with Greece, the labor question became a locus, or “interstice of power structure,” articulating competing and mutually exclusive visions of Cyprus as a polity. More generally the paper investigates the modalities of formation of a collective group allegiance in a context of constraint.