The New Labor History Museum: A Status Report

ABSTRACT Many of Labor's readers are aware of and should be thanked for the remarkable collabora-tions among labor historians and public historians over the years. Examples are varied and wide ranging and, in some cases, have been formative. Here at Temple University, where I direct the Center for Public History, I am constantly reminded of the professional debt I owe to the editorial conuence of three particular labor historians: Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig. Their Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public () inaugurated Temple Press's Critical Perspectives on the Past series, which has produced titles of considerable signicance for public historians and labor historians. I am not the rst person to recognize this shared legacy, nor am I alone in doing it recently. International Labor and Working-Class History mounted its own thematic spe-cial issue in fall . The Public Historian, my eld's principal journal, devoted an entire issue to the intersections of public and labor history in and one to the special case of industrial history museums in . Labor historians will be glad to learn that the National Council on Public History gave the Public History Project Award to the Bracero History Archive, which collects materials pertaining to the mid-twentieth-century guest worker program. In , the council's annual book award went to Cathy Stanton's mag-nicent The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (), which has quickly become one of the most inuential works of public history scholarship to date. Much of our common purpose relies on our conviction that history worth doing is history that encourages real change in real lives. Civic engagement is at the center of our shared enterprise. Marvin Ciporen anticipated as much in when, in an early issue of The Public Historian, he entreated readers to revisit the example of Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson and to become actively involved in trade union education. "Labor has often been neglected by historians," Ciporen noted, but "the current movement to develop a eld of public history could help ll some of this void. The desire of the public historians to expand the traditional uses of history . . . coincide[s] with unions' needs for these skills and their belief in the value of history" ("Labor's Use of History,"). Now that the eld of public history is well established, it is worth wondering whether Ciporen's aspirations have borne fruit. In this special review section, Labor takes up the question by exploring a cross section of American museum exhibits. Our goal is to learn what today's labor historians make of the fascinating work done by their colleagues in these selected public settings. It is worth noting that labor history gets done in a whole host of venues, including archives, historical associations, community organizations, and government agencies. Our intent is not to slight the remarkable scope of public historical endeavor but rather to join an ongoing conversation about a particular case of labor his-tory and museums.