Labor Activism In Time, and Song

Labor Rights in America: An Introductory Timeline (HEIN ONLINE)

Part of the HEIN ONLINE Library of Labor and Employment Law (described in primary sources, below).

Fight Like Hell: Music for Labor Day, curated Kim Kelly (Smithsonian Folkways, 2023)

Listen on Spotify, Apple, or Pandora.

Strategies To Orient and Anchor Your Work

Research Move 1: Build on a Lead You Have Already: The 'Item in Hand' Approach.

Key Resource: Google Scholar

Why:  You already know the value of examining footnotes and bibliographies for related scholarship or for identifying primary source material. 

Sometimes, though, you want to look beyond the item in hand -- not look at its antecedents but at its intellectual descendants -- the scholarship produced later and after, that has cited your item in its bibliography and footnotes. Following citation trails (Cited By) is an essential scholarly practice and Google Scholar is excellent for this kind of work. 

Research Move 2: Check for a subject bibliography as a way to direct your reading.

Key Resource: Oxford Bibliographies Online

Why: Selective rather than exhaustive and combining a bit of description with a little bit of evaluation, OBO entries help you identify some of the most important and influential scholarship on a broad social, political, cultural or interdisciplinary disciplinary topic.

Your very focused research question may not have a bibliography, but its larger dimensions - or its theoretical implications or something intellectually "adjacent" to it are likely to have some representation. 

(Often, though, the issue in information-seeking isn't scarcity of material but overabundance. OBO entries can help you solve the dilemma of knowing who to read first, what to read for, or simply which voices in the conversation you should give some fuller attention to.)

Example Entries: 

RESEARCH MOVE 2:  Look for a more or less recent research overview on your topic or its broader dimensions.

Key Resource: Annual Reviews

Why: Literature reviews help you easily understand—and contextualize—the principal contributions that have been made in your field. They not only track trends over time in the scholarly discussions of a topic, but also synthesize and connect related work. They cite the trailblazers and sometimes the outliers, and they even root out errors of fact or concept. Typically, they include a final section that identifies remaining questions or future directions research might take.  Social science fields like political science, law, economics, sociology, and business -- where you can expect issues of labor and work to be discussed -- are well represented here. 

Example Review:

Pro Tip: 

  • Watch your nomenclature. In the discipline of history, the common term for this research format is historiography. If your topic is weighted in the direction of history, you may find Annual Reviews less useful, so activate one or more of the strategies that follow. 

Other Strategies for locating literature reviews:

  • In subject databases, like those described below, you'll often be able to limit by literature review or review essay or historiography. You may need look for these these filters under the document type or methodology category. 
  • In book-length studies, the introduction (by author[s] or editor[s]) often acts as miniaturized lit review.  In the process of announcing its purpose and origins, introductions identify the intellectual forbears who laid the groundwork.
  • In dissertations, lit reviews commonly appear as an introductory or preliminary chapter. Try ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global. Dissertations aren't peer-reviewed in the same way that  published articles and academic books are, but they can also be a source for topics that are emerging, trending, or very current. 

Research Move 4: Deploy Language Strategically to Surface Backgrounds, Contexts, and Agenda-Setting Materials

Key Resource: HOLLIS 

Examples:

  • history is a way to get at full-length studies not just of countries or events, but also of ideas and concepts and broad subjects. 
  • historiograph*  can surface materials that address and synthesize approaches historians have used over time. 
  • handbook or companion: this is a key academic format, regardless of discipline and denotes a published book that republishes ground-breaking work, or commissions scholarly essays that summarize standard approaches and important or consensus views. Other terms to try: reader or anthology or even essays.
  • debate or controversy (or controvers* to pick up variants), or contested or disputed often help you surface works that identify the "stakes" of a particular argument, action, phenomenon, etc. So will words like proponents, advocates or their opposites: opponents or critics. Watch for insider language as you read.  For instance, political scientists favor the term puzzle. 
  • theory or theoretical or philosophy or philosophical might help you find works in larger contexts or examined via a "lens" of some kind.  You can truncate these terms, too, by the way: theor*, philosoph*

Subject Databases: Research Beyond HOLLIS, JSTOR, and Scholar

America History and Life (EBSCOhost)

Why: This is the disciplinary gold-standard database of scholarship on the U.S. and Canada, prehistory to present. 

Sociological Abstracts (ProQuest) 

Why: Covers the international literature in sociology, social work, and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. An essential resource for Social Studies concentrators.

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts (ProQuest)

Why:  Covers all aspects of political science, international relations, political history, theory, and philosophy, drawing its content from scholarship published around the world. 

The American Worker: Labor and Employment Law Collection (HEIN Online)

Why: Secondary sources included here include law reviews, scholarly articles,  some book-length studies, and legislative primersprepared for Congress (CRS reports) .  Primary sources from Supreme Court cases, accounts of labor riots from the not-so-distant past, reports on working conditions of today, and more. 

IDEAS RePEc (Research Papers in Economics)

Why: This is the largest collection Economics research on the Web, maintained by economists themselves.  

Thinking About Primary Sources: Some Online Collections

In addition to some of the primary source collections that are listed on your course website and syllabus, one or more of the resources below may have some research value for you. They are samples, rather than an exhaustive list.  Much more may exist on your topic -- in print on shelves, in our special collections and archives, and online.  

From ProQuest History Vault 

Federal Government 

News Collections

  • Chronicling America (LOC Newspaper Digitization project, full-text1690-1963, with some incomplete issues). Pro-Tip: The U.S. Newspaper Directory, 1690-present portion of the site will allow you to search by Labor category (see bottom of screen) to identify titles.
  • ProQuest Historical Newspapers: an archive of major mainstream U.S. dailies, from their first issue to the mid 2010s (end date varies by publication). This resource also contains and searches across a collection of historically significant Black newspapers
  • Alt-Press Watch: a collection of independent and alternative news sources, 1970 forward. 
  • Newspapers.com (via Harvard Key): excellent for coverage on the local / regional scale.

Online Catalogs for Finding Primary Sources

  • Hathi Trust: a rich repository of digitized materials in general.  Select Harvard Library from the drop-down menu under LOGIN before you search. 
  • Internet Archive: the great nonprofit online library that provides free access to collections of digitized materials including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual, and print materials.
  • Archive Grid: a database for locating collections (such as documents, personal papers, family histories, and other archival materials) held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives. It also provides contact information for the institutions where these archival collections are kept. ProTip:  Resorting results by summary view sometimes makes for easier browing. 
  • DPLA [Digital Public Library of America]: text, audio images freely available for use and download
  •  Labor History Links [Labor and Working Class History Association]

Some Harvard Online Exhibits and Special Collections

 

Finding Primary Sources in HOLLIS

Remember that our HOLLIS catalog is old -- in the best sense of the word. You'll find a treasure trove of primary source documents there from all periods, in all languages, and from most parts of the world.

Some Pro Tips: 

1.Think about time frame. 

One easy way to find texts and other items that are roughly contemporaneous with your course readings is to modify a HOLLIS search you've run, using the date limiters that appear on the right hand side of the screen.

2. Load your linguistic dice.

​Adding the word sources to a keyword search can sometimes be useful in surfacing republished collections of original documents and other primary materials. Reader, anthology, documents or documentary also can work well. ​

Remember, however, that this technique presupposes that someone has done the work of identifying, selecting, describing, and otherwise curating a set of materials. Major figures or groups, and major historical moments and concepts are more likely to generate this publication type. 

3. Think in terms of genre.

​Instead of adding a general word like sources, you can seek primary materials in HOLLIS in other ways.  For instance: you can run your keyword search and then scan the  Form/Genre filter on the right side of the results screen. 

Form/genre is commonly where you'll see primary sources of these types: correspondence (the official way of describing letters); diaries; exhibitions (typically designating the catalog of a museum show) ; speeches; interviews; memoirs; notebooks; personal narratives; pictorial works (a traditional way of identifying a collection of images); maps; photographs.

In HOLLIS, the form/genre label --powerful as it is -- has been inconsistently applied  So also tconsider adding genre terms to a straight keyword search. 

4. Think backward from a secondary source.

​Remember that the secondary literature you find  (scholarly journals, other biographies, and books) will themselves be built on primary source materials.  Canvass the bibliographies and footnotes. If the primary documents exist in a published form (rather than being unique to an archive you may not have access to), consider tracking them down at Harvard (if you're close to Cambridge) or (if you're not) at a library near you.

Some Special Print Collections Discoverable in HOLLIS

State Labor Pamphlets

This collection (33 boxes) is still unprocessed (meaning there is no finding aid for it). But you could request 1 or more of the boxes (which are organized by state) and investigate what's there. Items like these will require you to schedule time to view them in our secure reading room in Widener). 

Littauer Library Slichter Industrial Relations Collection, Microfilm Preservation Project

 

Getting Around Paywalls On the Web

Three ways to solve the access problem:

 

  • Tweak your Google Scholar Settings: One simple change can turn Scholar into what's effectively a Harvard database -- with links to the full-text of articles that the library can provide. Here's what to do:  Look to the left of the GS screen and click on the "hamburger" (); then click on .  Look for "Library Links."  Then type Harvard University into the search box and save your choice.  As long as you allow cookies, the settings will keep
  • Set up a Check Harvard Library Bookmark. It works like a browser extension; click on it when you want to check Harvard's access and it will "unlock" content we provide.

Directions are available here: https://library.harvard.edu/services-tools/check-harvard-library-bookmark.