Chicago's Labor Trail: Labor History as Collaborative Public History

Abstract

Historians of labor and working-class life face a powerful public amnesia; they seek to recover a past of struggle for economic security and dignity at work that is all too often obscured or even suppressed by consensual accounts of American history. Public historians necessarily work against similar lapses in popular memory. Historian Max Page has invoked the oppositional character of public history, which he asserts, “should by all rights be a radical undertaking. For, at its heart,” Page continues, “public history is about bringing history to a wider public, about challenging citizens out of complacency about their past and creating spaces for forgotten stories to be told.”