Even though he had impacted the lives of generations of my family who labored in the coal mines of England, Scotland, and Pennsylvania, John Brophy is the most important labor leader nobody knows. I certainly did not before I deposited myself in the Catholic University Archives, home of Brophy’s Papers, in 1989. Among mining families, Read More

May First is a date full of meaning as ‘May Day’, a traditional European spring festival, the Feast Day of St. Joseph the Worker for Roman Catholics, and International Workers’ Day for leftists. However one marks this day it is certainly an appropriate time to note one of the most important figures in American labor Read More

January 22 is the birthday of Terence Vincent Powderly (1849-1924), a man not widely remembered in the twenty-first century, but a national celebrity, an ‘American Idol’ if you will, in the tumultuous era of the late nineteenth century. Born in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, to Irish-Catholic immigrants, Powderly was a reform minded Mayor of Scranton (1878-1884), head Read More