The Migratory Labor Camp Newsletters Collection consists of newsletters produced by migrant workers in labor camps established by the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration in California and Washington during the 1930s ....
The Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Guild (MPSCG), then called the Hollywood Screen Cartoonists, created its constitution in 1937. Acting as an advocate for animators, the MPSCG fought for member representation in wage and hour disputes, and aimed to establish itself as...
In 2002, writer Emory Holmes II set out to establish a Poetry and Writers workshop at the Northeast Valley Senior Center in Pacoima, California. The project, entitled “Stories from my Hometown,” was largely funded by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, Regional Arts Grants Program. As a key component of the workshop, elder citizens ...
Over the course of the 1920s, attempts were made to unionize West Coast Longshoremen. However, it wasn’t until passage of the short-lived National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933 that West Coast Longshoremen had effectively organized. By early 1934, longshoremen across the length of the Coast from San Diego to...
The 1960s was a time when the status quo was quickly becoming unacceptable, and change seemed inevitable. By 1963, more than 16,000 American soldiers were stationed in South Vietnam with an even larger presence in Korea. Americans had grown tired of foreign wars, and protests grew as the Draft grew into a large concern for young people...
Special Collections and Archives houses a unique oral interview with Helen Thomas (1920-2013), long-time member of the White House press corps (1961-2010), in the Tom W. Reilly Collection. She was well known in the White House, among the press corps, and by political pundits. Her White House career spanned the service of ten presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama. She was also....
In 1936, the United States was midway through the worst economic disaster ever to hit the country. As spring turned to summer, the U.S. Congress passed the Merchant Marine Act of 1936. This new law replaced the old United States Shipping board. The newly created United States Maritime Commission was given a number of tasks, one of which was...
The Los Angeles Newspaper Guild was chartered in 1937 as a local chapter of the American Newspaper Guild. The Guild organized and represented newspaper employees throughout Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Orange, and San Bernardino counties in grievances and collective bargaining negotiations. The Los Angeles Newspaper Guild Collection is particularly rich in its coverage of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner strike, which lasted almost 10 years...
Political cartoons are valuable sources that can distill the social and cultural norms of an age. This distillation occurs because political cartoons portray common issues and events in terms that are meant to be easily understood by the general readership of a given publication, or publications. Their use as primary sources requires the understanding of several concepts including symbolism, metaphor, irony, and caricature....
In the United States, there are nine cities or towns named "Burbank." Though the botanist Luther Burbank is well known in his adopted state of California, the City of Burbank in the San Fernando Valley is named after Dr. David Burbank. He was trained as a dentist on the east coast and migrated to San Francisco in the early 1850s. By the early to mid-1860s, he had established...
