Developing Archives on Immigrant and Refugee Life, especially in the United States
Since 1965, the IHRC has created a vast archive of newspapers, oral histories, and personal papers, along with the organizational records of immigrants and refugees and the agencies created to serve them. Holdings are particularly rich on the labor migrants who came to the U.S. between 1880 and 1930s, on the displaced persons who arrived in the U.S. after World War II, and on the refugees resettled in the United States after 1975. The archives offer materials of interest to scholars of gender, ethnicity, labor, industry and technology Over two hundred researchers from Minnesota, the nation and world use the IHRC collections each year and hundreds more seek reference assistance. With Andersen Library caverns temporarily at capacity, collecting activities have been suspended while curators process a backlog of donations and write a collections policy that will serve the IHRC for the next decades of the twenty-first century.
