Smithsonian Press--Legacies--3Palace of Progress--Delegate's badge from American Federation of Labor convention in Kansas City, Missouri, 1898

Legacies: Collecting America's History at the Smithsonian, by Steven Lubar and Kathleen M. Kendrick

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Delegate's badge from American Federation of Labor convention in Kansas City, Missouri, 1898

Telling the story of work means telling the story of unions too. In 1989 the son of the labor union leader John Brown Lennon donated more than one hundred badges and other memorabilia from labor organizations to the National Museum of American History. This collection joined several large collections of labor memorabilia acquired in the late 1980s.