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The article discusses manuscript sources in American radicalism. Scholars interested in American radicalism must be prepared to travel widely if they expect to inspect manuscript sources. Virtually every state, almost every university library of any stature, has some such holdings. Socialists, and other radicals, were prolific writers of letters, memoranda, speeches and pamphlets. They also tended to keep extensive minutes of meetings of branches, committees, national boards, and even of factions. Moreover, most Socialists had a sense of history and preserved their records. Unfortunately, there is no single repository for this Socialist material. At one time it was expected that the Tamiment Institute-then called the Rand School-Library in New York would house the material. But Socialists, in the course of human events, split into innumerable factions, and the leaders of different factions gave their papers to various libraries some of them thousands of miles apart. There were also geographic reasons for the dispersion: the early Socialists of the Nineteenth century lived in Indiana, New York, Massachusetts, and (after 1880) California.

American Labor historians have until recently written labor history as a history of trade unions. Within the last few years, however, scholars have begun to look beyond the activities of particular unions and biographies of particular union leaders into the social, cultural and ethnic environments of American workers. This attempt is frustrated by the lack of written documents left behind by the ordinary worker. The trade-union newspapers and manuscripts, especially of the industrial workers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, although filling gaps in knowledge of union history, tell practically nothing about lives and informal activities of workers, either organized or unorganized. One knows little about their marriage habits, relationships with their parents, what they did during lay-offs, or how long they lived at home. Much of the material that historians have about the lives of the ordinary worker comes from the pens of middle-class investigators. Unfortunately, this material often tends to be sensational and of questionable reliability.