Describe Immigrant Labor and Ethnic Communities.

The purpose of your project
The research problem that motivates the project
The sources you have identified so far
Your working thesis, if you have one
The significance of your research project – Why does what you are studying matter? How will we understand the subject better as a result of your work?

Your preliminary bibliography should have six to eight sources, with at least three of them being primary in nature.
You may choose to write on any labor history topic (I am choosing Immigrant Labor and Ethnic Communities) of your choosing. You are encouraged to base your paper on one or more of the books in the Temple University Press Labor Studies and Work open-access collection. This collection of books is freely available to anyone for downloading and reading, and reflect some of the best labor history and labor studies scholarship published in the last 50 years. To access the books and read more about the project, visit to an external site.
If you choose not to use the books from the TU Press Labor Studies open-access collection, you must still use a combination of scholarly sources (books, book chapters, and articles written by historians and/or primary source documents) as sources for your paper. The James B. Carey library at the Rutgers Labor Education Center ( has a wide variety of print books and journals. You can use the Rutgers Libraries ( to search for books and articles located at the Carey Library and other Rutgers library branches, as well as digital articles and eBooks. Websites, encyclopedias, and other non-scholarly articles written for a general audience are not appropriate sources for your paper.