Labor History in NEPA: A CourseMain MenuIntroductionAnthracite Coal MinersThis module will examine the lives and legacies of anthracite coal miners in northeastern Pennsylvania.Textile WorkersThis module will examine the lives and legacies of workers, mostly women, who worked in silk mills, textile and garment manufacturing.TeachersThis module will explore the lives and legacies of teachers in northeastern Pennsylvania.Lori Shemanski33e02d2f7ef884e219611f0eafd74ac3408b6e8e
1media/duplan-010.jpgmedia/duplan-010crop.jpg2018-07-15T00:56:57+00:00Textile Workers24This module will examine the lives and legacies of workers, mostly women, who worked in silk mills, textile and garment manufacturing.image_header2018-07-26T01:33:34+00:00 Across northeastern Pennsylvania, practically each town had some kind of textile mill. At one time, the Duplan silk mill in Hazleton was the largest in the world. Now, most people might not even know that the industry existed here.
In this module we will examine the lives of the workers in the textile industry in northeastern Pennsylvania, including silk mills and garment manufacturing. As a class, we will research these forgotten factories and construct a digital map of where they were located.
Some topics we will explore:
Duplan Silk strikes - relationship to Paterson (N.J.) silk strike
Uprising of the Twenty Thousand in 1909
ILGWU and Min Matheson, local organizer; “runaway shops,” Unity House in the Poconos
Garment factories: Leslie Fay strike
Sources
Oral history interviews Newspaper articles about strikes James Oppenheim poem, "Bread and Roses," The American Magazine, December, 1911. Film: Norma Rae
Readings
Stepenoff, Bonnie. Their fathers' daughters : silk mill workers in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1880-1960. Selinsgrove [PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1999.
Golin, Steve. The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913
Tripp, Anne Huber. The I.W.W. and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913
The growth and decline of the women's garment industry and the ILGWU in Pennsylvania's northeastern anthracite region, 1930 to present. Conference on the History of Northeastern Pennsylvania (11th : 1999 : Nanticoke, PA)