The United States celebrates Labor Day this coming Monday, September 6. Some localities have held Labor Day marches in September since the 1870s, and it became a federal holiday following an act of Congress in 1894. Since its inception, the holiday has had a presence in the once-voluminous United States labor press. From invitations to parades and events to exhortations to abandon the holiday in favor of International Workers' Day on May 1, perspectives on Labor Day are as numerous as the publications themselves.

The New York Public Library subscribes to current labor periodicals in print and preserves a rich collection of historical periodicals on microfilm. But our online databases, many of which are accessible from home with your library card, also contain a wealth of historical publications. These publications are usually searchable, unlike microfilm and print, making them useful for researchers interested in a specific topic such as Labor Day.

HathiTrust Digital Library

The HathiTrust Digital Library provides access to digitized books and periodicals from the collections of research libraries across the country, including the New York Public Library. An underappreciated feature of HathiTrust is that its items, like the items in a research library’s catalog, are tagged with Library of Congress Subject Headings. In Advanced Catalog Search, researchers can search by subjects like “Labor Unions -- United States -- Periodicals” and select the option “full view” to view the full text of various papers.

One important periodical categorized under “Clothing Workers -- Labor Unions -- United States -- Periodicals” is the Ladies’ Garment Worker, the organ of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Published in both English and Yiddish, the Ladies’ Garment Worker took the occasion of Labor Day—or “Leybor Dei,” as it appeared in the Yiddish edition—1912 to educate its readership on the achievements of a major cloakmakers’ strike that had ended two years earlier, “lest the events of 1910 should be forgotten by some, or selfishly perverted by others.”

Chronicling America

Chronicling America is another free resource offering access to American newspapers held by the Library of Congress. In addition to a robust search feature that allows users to filter results by state, date, language, newspaper title, and even ethnicity, the site includes a “topics” page to highlight primary sources related to subjects in American History, including Labor Day.

Chronicling America is especially valuable for researchers interested in the U.S. foreign-language press. One such newspaper is Radnička Borba, or Worker’s Struggle, the organ of the South Slavic Federation of the Socialist Party of America. Chronicling America has issues of the paper from the 1940s, when it was published in Cleveland, Ohio. The paper’s coverage of Labor Day 1941 appeared in its regular column “Throughout Capitalist America” and took a distinctly sarcastic tone, making liberal use of quotation marks to indicate the paper’s skepticism about the holiday’s celebration of U.S. workers’ "gains" and improved working conditions.

American Periodicals

This database contains a handful of digitized trade journals related to specific trades or industries, as well as regional labor movement publications like Zanesville, Ohio’s Labor Journal. Like other databases from ProQuest, this one allows researchers to limit their search not only by date and publication but also by type of material (for example, advertisement or Image/Photograph). Shown here is a photograph of members of the local Typographical Union No. 199 in the 1904 labor day parade, holding a banner urging onlookers to buy union-printed goods. The accompanying article praises the union men’s "neat and manly appearance."

Leftist Newspapers and Periodicals

This database, also from ProQuest, aggregates 145 left-wing historical newspapers and magazines from the U.S. and U.K. Once logged into the database, click on “Publications” to go straight to a specific periodical. Shown here is a 1910 cartoon in the Industrial Worker, the newspaper of the Industrial Workers of the World, criticizing the American Federation of Labor’s practice of having police, or "the boss’ uniformed clubbers," lead Spokane’s annual "Labor (?) Day" parade and noting that police had this year been excluded from the parade due to the "efforts of a few militant members of the Cooks and Waiters."

The Library’s databases are a great place to start your research, but they represent only a fraction of our holdings. To get started on researching labor unions  at NYPL, whether here at the Library or at home with your library card, check out our new research guide on the topic. The guide will help you navigate the Library’s catalog to identify periodicals, books, and more related to trade unionism in the United State.

Go to the guide >> Researching Labor Unions at NYPL