The Samuel Gompers Papers is a documentary editing project that collects, annotates, and makes available to as wide an audience as possible, primary sources of American labor history. Drawing on Gompers material and other labor-related sources at the Library of Congress, the U.S. Department of Labor, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and the George Meany Memorial Archives, as well as public and university manuscript repositories, various union offices, and other locations, the project has published two microfilm series of union records and nine edited volumes of Gompers' papers.  The project also makes available its wide collection of microfilm, photocopied material, and annotation files to students and researchers.

The Samuel Gompers Papers is sponsored by the University of Maryland, College Park, and housed in McKeldin Library. It is supported by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the AFL-CIO.  The project has also enjoyed the support of AFL-CIO affiliated unions, the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk, the Joseph Anthony Beirne Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.

Stuart B. Kaufman, author of Samuel Gompers and the Origins of the American Federation of Labor (1973), founding editor of Labor's Heritage,and a member of the History Department from 1970 until his death in 1997, launched the project in 1974.  Under his direction,  a crew of historians and graduate students plowed through Gompers' letterbooks, located and microfilmed union records, and searched for evidence of Gompers' family, friends, and associates in newspaper reports, government documents, and vital records.

Peter Albert and Grace Palladino are the current project directors.   Peter has been with the Gompers Papers from the beginning and produced the project's first microfilm collection, The American Federation of Labor Records:  The Samuel Gompers Era. He has also edited 16 collections of historical essays, the most recent being Launching the "Extended Republic": The Federalist Era.  Grace joined the project in 1984.  She is the author of Another Civil War: Labor, Capital, and the State in the Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania, Dreams of Dignity, Workers of Vision: A History of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and Teenagers: An American History. She is currently writing a history of the AFL-CIO's Building and Construction Trades Department.

Over the years, a creative and insightful group of historians has contributed to the project as editors, NHPRC fellows, or graduate assistants including  Mary Jeske and Marla Hughes, our current assistant editors, Joseph Bedford, Patricia Cooper, Janet Davidson, Ileen DeVault, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf,  Edwin Gabler, Michael Honey, Dolores Janiewski,  Katherine Morin,  and Dorothee Schneider.