Fifty years ago, on March 16, 1968, in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in Quảng Ngãi Province, American soldiers, led by Lt. William Calley, summarily executed over 500 men, women, children, and babies at point blank range.
One of the great pleasures of spending this summer in the archives as a Mellon Public Humanities Fellow has been stumbling into and out of people’s lives, or the echoes of them left behind in correspondence, records, doodles, drafts, and other materials. There are a lot of recognizable names in the Special Collections Library stacks, but for every person I’ve read or heard about there are so many more who are new to me...
The University of Michgan has a long history of student activism on campus, particularly around antiwar movements. An especially significant event was the Feburary 1970 protest against General Electric recruiting engineers on campus. The Labadie Collection’s Subject Vertical Files has documentation of this event which helps us understand the contexts of student activism in the past and present.
Preserving the history of labor movements has been core to the Labadie Collection’s mission since its very beginnings more than a century ago. In 2016, two important collections on 20th century labor organizing have been arranged to better facilitate research. The Joyce Kornbluh Collection (3.25 linear ft.) and the Don Stewart IWW Collection (3 linear ft.) conserve evidence of the regular confrontations between workers, corporations, and government throughout the past hundred years.
An unforgettable figure of the anarchist and syndicalist communities, Federico Arcos (1920-2015) was known for his generosity and the unabating commitment with which he pursued his ideals. Friends of the Labadie Collection remember Arcos as a long-time benefactor and collector. Federico and his wife Pura curated in their home in Windsor, Canada, an important library of anarchist books, newspapers, and archives that never failed to impress their many guests. In addition to the many items he...
As the only grandchild of Jo and Sophie Labadie, Carlotta Anderson was fascinated by her family's history. She wrote an authoritative biography of her grandfather, researched anarchism, labor unions and Detroit history before the auto industry, and preserved original family documents dating back to the nineteenth century. Anderson was a dear friend of the Labadie Collection and, shortly before her death she donated important papers that are now open for research.
Before the 21st century marriage equality campaign, how did LGBT individuals frame their own relationships against the backdrop of a hostile society? Delving into the Joseph A. Labadie Collection, a pioneering record of American social and political protest movements, uncovers some surprising answers.
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