Friday, May 24, 2002

Students' Research Forms the Basis of a Web Site on Labor Journalism By BROCK READ Online information about the history of labor unions can be hard to come by, says James Gregory, an associate professor of history at the University of Washington at Seattle. But students in one of his courses, "Class and Labor in American History," are working to alleviate that problem -- by designing their own Web sites about labor issues in their state. Most recently, Mr. Gregory and his students completed the Labor Press Project, a Web site collecting information on newspapers and other publications run by unions and radical groups in the 20th-century Pacific Northwest. The project covers Washington State's best-known labor journals, like the Seattle Union-Record, whose circulation reached 80,000 in the early 1900s. It also highlights obscure periodicals, including newspapers written for anarchists, Philippine-Americans, and unemployed citizens. Mr. Gregory canvassed his university's microfilm collection to find the periodicals. He then put the project in the hands of his 35 students, assigning each a publication. First, they filled in a template of information detailing their papers' circulation, price, location, and dates of publication; then they outlined the histories of the publications. The reports "go in different directions depending on students' interests," according to Mr. Gregory. "Some did very interesting things about the quality of the journalism or key issues that were of some importance to the newspaper." Each report is accompanied by images showing a typical issue of the periodical. Mr. Gregory reviewed drafts of the reports and edited final versions for the Web site, which was designed by Brian Grijalva, one of his students. But the main goal of the Labor Press Project is to make his students' writing public -- and to encourage his class to write carefully. (Students retain copyrights to their essays and authorize Mr. Gregory to use the articles on the site.) The Labor Press Project is the second Web site for which Mr. Gregory's students performed the research. He developed the idea for the first such site, the Seattle General Strike Project, while examining some of his favorite papers written by students. "The terrific ones have ended up in file drawers," he says, "and as the file drawers piled up, I thought, 'It's too bad this kind of work by undergraduates can't be more widely available.'" The Web page has proved more popular than Mr. Gregory expected: In April, more than 3,000 people visited it. According to Michael Kazin, a professor of history at Georgetown University, the site's popularity is deserved. "Projects like Mr. Gregory's demonstrate how rich labor journalism once was, and could be again," says Mr. Kazin. "The cooperative spirit of the Web site exemplifies the best side of the labor movement." Each time Mr. Gregory offers the course on labor history, he creates a different online project for his students. Currently, he is completing his third such site, which chronicles the history of communism in Washington State through interviews, photographs, and student essays. Although he does not ask students in his other courses to develop Web sites, Mr. Gregory says he will continue to use them to teach about class and labor as long as his students enjoy working on them. "The level of excitement and commitment that most of the students display is really refreshing. They put so much into it," he says. He also credits the Web projects with rejuvenating his teaching. "These are fascinating activities," he says. "It really makes a huge difference that the students are producing history, instead of consuming it." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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