The New York City Immigrant Labor History Project was led by Herbert Gutman, a professor of history at the City College of New York (CCNY), between 1972 and 1976. The project sought to reexamine immigrants' and migrants' patterns of cultural adaptation to urban and industrial life in the early 20th century in order to challenge the prevailing theories in social history at the time. The collection consists of 222 interviews with Eastern European, Irish, Italian, Russian, Scandinavian, and West Indian immigrants and black and Puerto Rican migrants, most of whom settled in New York, New York between between 1900 and 1930. Topics discussed in the interviews include education, childhood, and early life in the narrators' countries and states of origin; arrival at Ellis Island and first impressions of New York City; assimilation; women's roles in the workforce and in the household; courtship, marriage, and family life; processes of acquiring and retaining work; job responsibilities, wages, and working conditions; ethnic and racial makeup of different workforces, factories, and shops; labor unions and organizing in different industries; ethnic and racial relations in the community and the workplace; living conditions in different neighborhoods in New York City; politics; leisure activities; and religion.
