SOC W 500

The Pacific Northwest Antiwar and Radical History Project is a multimedia web project that aims to chronicle the social impact of war and the rich history of antiwar activity in the Northwest. With video oral histories, hundreds of photographs and documents, GI underground newspapers, movement biographies, and research reports, the project illuminates this integral part of the Northwest’s social and political history. This site is one of a collection of Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights Projects based at the University of Washington in Seattle, which involve undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and community members.

This 15,000 page reference center is dedicated to providing information to the general public on African American history and on the history of the more than one billion people of African ancestry around the world.

The Bracero History Archive collects and makes available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964. Millions of Mexican agricultural workers crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the states in America.

These are talks at luncheons and Hall of Fame inductions.

The Densho Archives contain primary sources that document the Japanese American experience from immigration in the early 1900s through redress in the 1980s, with a strong focus on the World War II mass incarceration. The archives are growing as Densho continues to record life histories and collect images and records. We provide these resources to students, teachers, researchers, and the general public for educational purposes.

This site, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, includes a browsable archive, as well as lots of other tools, timelines and multimedia information.

Florence Kelley was the first woman factory inspector in the United States, appointed in Illinois by Governor John Peter Altgeld in 1893. A resident of Hull House, and a reformer – who refused to be associated with any political party–Florence Kelley lived in Chicago from 1891 until 1899, leading and participating in a variety of projects. These included: a wage and ethnicity census of the slums and tenements in Chicago; the reporting of cases and contagion in the smallpox epidemic of 1893; the enforcement of the universal primary education laws, and, most importantly, enforcing the provisions of the Illinois Factory Inspections Law of 1893.

The first woman to serve in a U.S. Cabinet, a key advisor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a lifelong advocate for social justice and economic security. Responsible for initiating groundbreaking New Deal programs that are a bulwark of American society today — Social Security, the 40-hour work week, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, and the minimum wage.

Four hundred years ago, on August 20, 1619, a ship carrying about 20 enslaved Africans arrived in Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. Though America did not even exist yet, their arrival marked its foundation, the beginning of the system of slavery on which the country was built. In August, The New York Times Magazine will observe this anniversary with a special project that examines the many ways the legacy of slavery continues to shape and define life in the United States.

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

Information on Confederated Tribes of Colville, Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Nez Perce, Coeur d'Alene, Selis u Qlispe, Spokan, Umatilla, and Yakama.

Published by the National Indian Law Library

This is a collection of resources for research on the history of women in America. The library's holdings are strong in: Women's rights and feminism; Health and sexuality; Work and family life; Education and the professions; and Culinary history and etiquette. Collections that have been completely digitized include: Susan B. Anthony, Beecher-Stowe Family, Blackwell Family, Charlotte Perkins Gilman,

The University of Washington Special Collections began collecting oral histories in the 1960s as part of an effort to document the history and culture of our regional ethnic communities. Forging partnerships with local organizations, oral historians recorded interviews with members of the Scandinavian American, African American, Japanese American, and Jewish communities in Seattle and Washington State. Later, this effort broadened to document the Northwest arts community and spawned new projects such as the North Cascades History Project.

There are transcripts of interviews with representatives of over a dozen different immigrant communities, including Chinese, Filipino, Hmong, Karen, Khmer, Latino, Pacific Islander, Somali, Tibetan and Vietnamese.

A community archive devoted to the collection, preservation and sharing of trans histories, organized in collaboration with the New York Public Library

Over 80 oral histories were conducted from 2018-2019 through the National Park Service’s Stonewall Oral History Project, in partnership with The Center and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Hear from community members, activists, West Village residents and more about their personal experiences related to the Stonewall Riots, as well as organizing before and after the events.

The New York Public Library's Community Oral History Project is an initiative taking place throughout the NYPL system that aims to document, celebrate, and make accessible the rich history of the city's unique neighborhoods by collecting the stories of people who have experienced it firsthand.

Beginning in 2013 at Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village and building momentum, oral histories are now being collected in neighborhoods throughout the city. Visible Lives, an oral history project on the disability experience is another large scale collection effort, based out of Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library. To date, more than one thousand stories have been collected by close to three hundred community volunteers.

At this site you can read transcripts from several oral history projects, including ERA, Women in Politics, Women of the West and more.

This collection has a small amount that can be viewed online. See the UMedia collection.

The finding aids are digitized, but not the materials themselves.

National Archives listing of materials. These are not digitized.