Labor History on the World Wide Web: Thoughts on Jumping onto a Moving Express Train

Abstract

The World Wide Web has undergone remarkable expansion of late and this growth poses challenges to all historians. In an article published recently in the Journal of American History, Roy Rosenzweig offered a variety of measures of that growth: the Online Computer Library Center, for instance, reported a Ž vefold increase in unique web sites between 1997 and 2000, estimating some 7.1 million sites in October 2000; the Search engine Google indexed some 1.3 billion web pages, a Ž gure that now exceeds 1.6 billion as this article is being written (November–December 2001); and searchable databases on the World Wide Web, not accessible to conventional search engines, by some estimates total 550 billion web pages.1 As historians we are all used to some version of the information explosion, but this is really too much! What sense can labor historians make of the vast new resources now accessible on the World Wide Web, and how can we best draw on these resources for our research and teaching? It is difŽ cult to climb up on a moving train, but climb on this express we must. And while no one can claim to “keep up” with the rapidly changing state of the World Wide Web, it is important to take stock of some of the more important resources available on the Web and to consider strategies for keeping abreast of this information explosion. In this article, I offer a sketch of resources currently on the World Wide Web that should be of interest to labor historians. As Labor History begins this issue with new editors and a new Mission Statement, it seems an opportune moment for this sort of stock-taking. That statement re ects the ways that the Ž eld of labor history has changed in the more than 40 years since this journal Ž rst appeared. Topics that play a larger role in labor history in 2002 than was the case in 1960 include the representation of work and an emphasis on labor systems. The expanding interest in issues of gender and the domestic sphere in the social reproduction of labor also might surprise the journal’s founding generation. The Cultural Turn has had its impact on labor history, as in all Ž elds, and so the cultural dimensions of class are increasingly a focus. And Ž nally, the expansion of the geographical range of the journal to include Canadian and Latin American history re ects the increasing importance of global and comparative approaches within the historical discipline. In this survey of recent developments on the World Wide Web, I will try to cast my net as widely as the journal’s new Mission Statement. As a fast moving target, the web demands strategies to deal with its constant transformation. Consider the fate of a survey of the web published in this journal a little more than two years ago. John H. Summers wrote a Ž ne essay exploring “American