For over half a century, the University of Iowa (UI) Labor Center has played a central role in worker education, labor research, and the preservation, promotion, and teaching of labor and working-class history in Iowa and the Midwest. Founded in the 1950s, the center has developed critical links between the labor movement and academics, archivists, and educators across the state, becoming a focal point for numerous successful collaborations that enrich scholarship while directly improving the lives of Iowa workers.
Among the most celebrated of these collaborations is the Iowa Labor History Oral Project (ILHOP). Initiated by leaders in the Iowa Federation of Labor during the 1970s, ILHOP has become a major university-community partnership and arguably the largest and longest-running labor-focused oral history project in the United States. Project staff have collected more than twelve hundred oral history interviews with workers from communities and occupations all over the state. Among the...
