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Welcome

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Hello Msulaiman91, and Welcome to Wikipedia!

Welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you enjoy the encyclopedia and want to stay. As a first step, you may wish to read the Introduction.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me at my talk page – I'm happy to help. Or, you can ask your question at the New contributors' help page.


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Msulaiman91, good luck, and have fun.PamD 07:20, 8 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

California Labor School

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The California Labor School (CLS), formerly the Tom Mooney Labor School (renamed in 1944),[1] was an educational institution in San Francisco from 1942 to the 1950s. Opened in the midst of World War II, it had the premises of “Education for Victory” and “Side by Side with the army training camps, with the industrial training programs, with the civilian defense classes, it will undertake the systematic training and education of the men and women of San Francisco in the principles for which our country and the United Nations are fighting” [2] . Upon its opening, Dave Jenkins served as the founding director and Dr. Holland Roberts served as the school’s educational director. In 1949, Roberts succeeded Jenkins. In 1948 the school was placed on the Subversive List and attendances declined. The school closed in the 1950s.[3]

The school was founded in August 1942, in premises above a car saleroom at 678 Turk Street, and named for labor leader Tom Mooney who had died on 6 March that year. It later moved to a 5-storey building at 216 Market Street, and in 1947 bought premises at 240 Golden Gate Avenue.[3] World War II was a time period when unions and industry worked together to achieve maximum production for war effort. The United States was also an ally of the USSR. To supplement the war effort in the United States, the school "promised to analyze social, economic and political questions in light of the present world struggle against fascism".[3] [4] . It offered courses on a wide variety of subjects, including labor organization, journalism, music, drama, history, women’s studies, economics, and industrial arts. Classes were taught by union officials and professors who volunteered from industrial and labor sectors and neighboring universities, such as Stanford University, University of California- Berkeley, and San Francisco State University. [1] It also taught the arts: the teenage Maya Angelou had a scholarship to study dance and drama.[5]The school was supported by 72 trade unions, members of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations., including CIO locals, American Veterans’ Committee of California. CIO Councils, Communist Party, local leaders of National Lawyers’ Guild, and the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. From 1945 to 1947 the school was accredited for veterans' education under the G.I. Bill of Rights, and by 1947 there were 220 full time students, among the 1800 students attending 135 classes. It moved to a nearby larger location in the same vicinity and also expanded with extension classes in Oakland and other areas in Northern California. The accreditation was unique amongst contemporary progressive schools and brought in many students with government funding who otherwise would not have been able to attend. Its prominence enabled it to host influential guest speakers, such as Orson Welles, W.E.B DuBois, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Eric Sevareid [6] . Choral and drama groups, comprised of students and union members, were created to entertain at various school and union events. The United States State Department also asked the school to serve as a host for labor delegations to the founding conference of the United Nations.

In 1946, the school was investigated by the Tenney Committee, the California legislature’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, on the charge that an institute jointly held by the school and the University of California was Communist-sponsored. Although in 1948 the school was at its peak prominence, it was also placed on the subversive list by the US Attorney General Tom Clark, and student attendance declined. Due to its subversive status, any student that was affiliated with the school could not be employed by the federal government or any institution that required a loyalty oath. Beginning in 1951, it lost its relevance as a vital center for labor education but survived as a center of resistance during the McCarthy years. The remaining students continued to support a reduced number of classes on the Cold War, McCarthyism, US History, the USSR, Socialism, writing, literature, and the arts. In 1957, the school lost in the case of the California Labor School in San Francisco v. Subversive Activities Control Board and was ordered to register as a Communist front. That same year, it was closed by the Internal Revenue Services for alleged non-payment of taxes. NOTABLE INSTRUCTORS AND ALUMNI Dr. Frank Oppenheimer- instructor, brother of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer director of Los Alamos Manhattan Project. Harry Hay- instructor, founder of American Homosexual Movement Maya Angelou- student, dance and drama scholarship

References: Finding Aid for the California Labor School Records, 1942-1955". University of Michigan: Special Collections Library http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=california-labor-school-cr.xml. California Labor School Biographical History http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-HOAC&month=1111&week=a&msg=mAd9bAF9E%2BGFh7sWArjydA. Humanities and Social Sciences Online

Editing collaboratively

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Hallo, Toby Higbie left a message on my talk page about California Labor School so I thought I'd come and talk here.

Firstly, your course page here instructs you to add the course assignment template to the talk page of the article you're working on. It would have been helpful if you had done this.

Secondly: It's not helpful to delete comments from your talk page - you have the right to do so, but it makes it more difficult for other editors to know what's already been said. Difficult, but not impossible - all the previous messages are stored in the history of your talk page, so they won't go away completely.

Thirdly: California Labor School. Let me tell you the history. I was stub-sorting the article on Giacomo Patri. I made a link for the CLS, then when it was a redlink I looked into the organisation and decided it needed a Wikipedia article. I searched around, found a few sources, created a short stub article with the bare bones of its history and its former name (with link to Tom Mooney), and incoming link from Tom Mooney Labor School and an entry on the CLS disambiguation page. I'm no expert on American labor history, or California, and I didn't include every scrap of information I found, leaving it to someone with more expertise in the field to expand the stub article with more content, perhaps using the same sources I'd found, perhaps with new print or online sources. The version I left was brief but tidy. Two other editors added categories.

Then you came along and pasted your own contribution into the encyclopedia, overwriting the existing article - no apparent attention to Wikipedia formatting, no categories, some references but a lot of unsourced text. Did you even look at your work after doing so? Presumably not, as you didn't add the <references /> tag which a large red footnote points out as being needed (and which TB added later). Did you not notice that your format was completely different from standard Wikipedia formatting - we don't do headings all in CAPITALS. You didn't include any links to any other articles. You mangled the links you included (your reference 1 is an unlinked version of the previous reference 1). Do you think your version was an improvement?

Wikipedia is an international encyclopedia, created by a worldwide volunteer community of editors. If you are joining this community, even involuntarily because it is part of your course work, please try to work with other editors and respect the encyclopedia and its readers.

I look forward to seeing you expanding the article carefully, adding the further information you have found, helped by your subject expertise in labor history, but noting the standards for formatting etc which are used in Wikipedia. Give references for the content which you add, and format them tidily (not just raw URLs). It should end up as a much better article than the little stub I created to start with. (Are there any illustrations you can find? Its former premises, or a logo or banner or anything like that?)

I'm sorry you've had this shaky start to editing Wikipedia, but I hope you'll find, as so many of us do, that it's fascinating and rewarding to create and edit articles to share information worldwide. There's a lot to learn about Wikipedia editing, but it's an interesting journey. Good luck. PamD 09:29, 9 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]