UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Following three years of digitization and preparation, Penn State University Libraries has made available a vast collection of archival materials documenting the 20th-century American working-class experience, including the largest and most significant record series within the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) archives.
“Beneath the Surface and Cast in Steel: Forging the American Industrial Union Movement” is the end result of a two-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards program. The project’s purpose is twofold: to increase the visibility of these rich historical materials to national and international scholars, and to inform collaborative efforts to further document this intersection of labor and social history.
The $239,000 grant was administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources, an independent nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions and communities of higher learning. The Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives program supports the creation of digital representations of unique content of high scholarly significance that will be usable as elements of a cohesive national collection.
“It’s important to make records such as these readily accessible in digital format for students, especially graduate students who struggle to get research grant funding,” said James Quigel, curator for the University Libraries’ historical collections and labor archives. “This is a large-scale digitization effort that highlights one of our primary collection areas.”
The collection includes materials that document the historical connections among three important American labor organizations: the UMWA, the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, and the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers. The crucial nexus of these three groups was instrumental in forging the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) industrial union movement in the 1930s — a precursor to today’s AFL-CIO — and securing labor’s organizing and workplace rights.
A core component of this extensive labor and management relations repository is the inclusion of collections, photograph, and historical scrapbooks that provide context to the labor movement in Pennsylvania. One of these is the UMWA’s poverty survey of miners in Appalachia during the 1940s, used to make the case for better housing and living conditions. Also included is the UMWA President’s Office Correspondence with Districts, 1894–1983 series, one of the most important record series and the largest in the UMWA archives.
“Beneath the Surface and Cast in Steel” joins more than 135 University Libraries digital collections on topics ranging from agriculture to world history. An estimated 377,000 pages of manuscripts and mixed-material printed items, photographs, scrapbooks, survey materials, panoramic images, and correspondence are currently accessible online at the Beneath the Surface and Cast in Steel site and through the Libraries’ website.
For more information, contact Quigel at jpq1@psu.edu, or Sue Kellerman, Judith O. Sieg Chair for Preservation, at lsk3@psu.edu.