this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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History
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1893 rang a bell for me because that was the year the Western Federation of Miners was established. There's a lot of interesting research to be done on the early attempts to organize in western mining towns, and the Couer d'Alene strike of 1892 and the subsequent founding of the WFM (which later helped found the IWW) would make for a perfect stopping point for your narrative.
The first volume of Philip Foner's history of American labor takes place entirely within your time period (it ends with the founding of the AFL), so you can mine that for other ideas that could be worthy of a paper.
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A great book that just came out last year, Dylan Penningroth's Before the Movement, uses local archives (in Virginia and Mississippi mainly) to investigate how Black Americans made use of the legal system before the Civil Rights Era. The first few chapters may give you ideas of something to investigate in your own state's archives - how people even without formal rights went about getting married and divorced, slaves who owned property, lawyers who catered to Black clients, etc.
Topic approved! Just got word back today. Though the professor did a sneaky this morning and changed the cutoff date 1878. Boo!
Hell yeah! / Boo! Good luck with the paper.