Labor and Employment: The American Worker

Using the Timeline

This database features an interactive timeline that charts labor efforts to organize from 1842 up to the current decline—and rise—of unions in America. Interspersed within the timeline are acts, court cases, statistics, and more, represented through images, videos, and links to full-text documents in HeinOnline.

1. Photographs put faces to the names of people mentioned on a given timeline point. Source information is provided underneath the media on the right-hand side, with a caption on the left-hand side. Click an image to see a bigger version in our Flickr account, along with the other pictures we used (and almost used) for this timeline.
2. Hyperlinks within the text, such as those demonstrated here, take users to the quoted documents where they reside in HeinOnline.
3. Other hyperlinks take users to additional, supplemental resources.
4. These arrows will take users ahead (4b) or backwards in the timeline (4a).
5. This linear calendar plots all the timeline points by month and year. It can also be used to jump to different events rather than moving point-by-point via the arrows.

To use the timeline, click the white arrow on the right-hand side of the screen to page ahead through the various points of the timeline. Need to back up to a previous slide? Use the white left-hand arrow that will appear once a user begins moving through the timeline. Previews of the next and preceding points' headlines will also populate below the white arrows.

Need to speed ahead into the future (or fly back into the past) and don't want to click through the timeline point by point? Every point is plotted along a linear calendar, showing the year and month an event occurs, offering a visualization of where events fall in relation to each other. Users can also see a preview of the media type displayed on a point. To navigate this feature, click + pull across this linear calendar and select a desired point to jump ahead to on the timeline. Change how this linear calendar is displayed by using the plus or minus magnifying glasses to increase or decrease the zoom level.