Today’s guest post is authored by Kimball Baker,  former graduate student of the Catholic University History Department.(1) A half-century ago, on May 9, 1970, America lost one of its greatest heroes, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, in the crash of a plane whose engine, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, was missing parts Read More

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

Though there was a museum at The Catholic University of America (CUA) going back to the university’s founding in the late 19th century, the Archives at CUA originated much later as shortly before World War II Msgr. Francis Haas began collecting the papers of important Catholic labor leaders such as Terence Powderly, head of the Read More