History glossary
union
an organisation through which workers negotiate over pay and conditions.
- Category
- Civil rights
- Region
- United States
- Date range
- 1954–1968
What it means
A trade union represents workers collectively. Union recognition means an employer accepts it as their negotiating representative. This was a central demand of the Memphis sanitation strike.
Stories using this term
Imperial Japan
From Meiji modernisation to colonial rule, militarism, mobilisation and defeat, Imperial Japan rose as a modern empire before collapsing in 1945.
Apartheid South Africa
From white minority rule to mass resistance, Mandela's release and the first democratic election, apartheid reshaped South Africa and the world.
The Holocaust
From legal discrimination to genocide, the Holocaust traces twelve years of escalating persecution that killed six million Jews and millions of others across Nazi-occupied Europe.
Nazi Germany
From Weimar collapse to WWII, Nazi Germany imposed totalitarian rule, expansion, and genocide.
Operation Barbarossa
From Hitler's ideological war in the east to Soviet survival before Moscow, Barbarossa turned expected blitzkrieg into prolonged attritional catastrophe.
The Byzantine Empire
From Constantine's new capital to the fall of Constantinople, Byzantium preserved Roman law, Orthodox Christianity, imperial government and classical learning through more than a thousand years of adaptation.
The American Revolution and Early Republic
From colonial tensions to independence, this traces the birth and early struggles of the United States of America.
The Anglo Boer Conflict
A war between Britain and Boer republics that exposed imperial costs and reshaped South Africa.
