SOURCES OF LABOR HISTORY AT THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LIBRARY FOR SOCIAL STUDIES AND RESEARCH.

Labor history sources at the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research in Los Angeles are part of a larger collection on 20th century social and political history developed by Library founder Emil Freed. When Freed opened the Library in 1963, he brought into being an institution that would house much of the material he had collected during a lifetime on the Left and in the labor movement. The idea of a Library to preserve the history of labor and the Left took firm hold in Freed's mind in the 1950s, when Freed rescued the personal libraries of friends who, vulnerable to the repression of the Cold War era, were on the verge of destroying their political books and pamphlets. To these collections Freed added his own accumulation of documents from various struggles in which he had been closely involved: the Unemployed Councils of the 1930s, the Hollywood studio strikes of the 1940s, and the Civil Rights Congress of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Beyond the 25,000 volume book collection, of which U.S. labor history is a particular emphasis, the Library's 20,000 item pamphlet collection is a rich source for labor research.