Search the Media Repository
Discover the curated images, videos, and primary sources featured throughout Foundations and Futures
History is more than just text on a page; it is the photographs, voices, and artifacts of the people who lived it. The images and recordings featured across Foundations and Futures are part of a meticulously curated media repository. Whether you are building a lesson plan or investigating an artifact, you can use this database to trace the provenance of our media: discover who created an asset, the historical context behind it, and how it can be used to bring Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences into your classroom.
Multimedia
Chapters
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Video
Personal Agency and Financial Freedom
In this clip, retired garment worker and union organizer Alice Ip discusses how the money and personal agency she got from her job made all the difference in her life as a single mother.
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Image
Factory Worker Teaches Coworker
Yook Chee Hom (left), a highly skilled worker, helps factory coworkers with new styles. This image reflects Chinese immigrant women helping one another instead of competing against one another. Hom was very active in ILGWU Local 23-25.
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Image
Peter Yew Protest
Community photographer Corky Lee captures an interaction between police officers and a man bleeding from head wounds at a protest against the 1975 beating of Peter Yew. Lee’s image highlights Chinese American participation in movements for justice.
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Image
Chinese Community Members Protest
Chinese community members hold up protest signs in English and Chinese at a “We Won’t Move” campaign demonstration at the New York Telephone Company, an example of the Chinese community’s engagement with collective action (c. 1970).
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Audio
An Interview with Alison Wong
Alison Wong reflects on the importance of her mother’s relationships with her garment factory coworkers.
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Video
Importance of Cultural Food
In this clip, former Vice President of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) May Chen discusses the importance of cultural food and explains the double meanings of soy sauce chicken and pork bones for garment workers.
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Image
Bachelor Society in Chinatown
This photograph taken on Pell Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown c. 1899 captures the “bachelor society” of the community.
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Image
Courtesy of Museum of Chinese in America
Many elderly Chinese women workers were assigned to the finishing section of a garment factory. They trimmed loose threads off the finished garments and prepared the clothes for shipping.
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Image
Garment Workers Quilt
This quilt sewn by garment workers depicts specialized section work. For eight weeks, garment workers volunteered to sew the quilt for a 1989 exhibit at the New York Chinatown History Project (later named Museum of Chinese in America).
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Video
Union Benefits
In this video excerpt, Mrs. Wong (retired garment worker), her daughter, Alison Wong, and Professor Margaret Chin (Hunter College, City University of New York) discuss the important benefits that union membership provided New York Chinatown garment workers.
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Image
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Aftermath
This image captures the destruction at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory after the devastating fire on March 25, 1911. Garment factory sewing wheels can be seen amongst the rubble.
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Image
Job Openings at Factory
The division of the sewing through the “section work” production line is reflected in this Chinese handbill. In English it reads: “Skirt-pant factory seeking one pocket setter, seeking one zipper setter, seeking two regular lock-stitch operators, 88 Eldridge Street, fifth floor.”
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Video
Piecework Compensation
Former New York Chinatown garment workers Katie Quan, Connie Ling, and Wing Ma share their first-hand experiences of the “piecework” compensation system.
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Image
Grandfather and Grandson
Extended family members often cared for children while their mothers were working in the garment factories.
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Image
Woman At Work in Chinatown Factory
A woman working at a garment factory on Canal Street in New York City’s Chinatown.
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Image
Chinatown Garment Factory Floor
An inside look of the floor layout in a garment factory located in New York City’s Chinatown, c. 1980.
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Text
1910 Ad for Shirtwaists
A 1910 advertisement for shirtwaists, a relatively simple and functional ready-to-wear garment that was inexpensive to manufacture. At the time, over a third of the nation’s ready-to-wear clothing was produced by New York City’s garment industry.
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Image
Museum Exhibit of Chinatown Sewing Factory
This photograph of a permanent exhibit at the Tenement Museum depicts a replica of a typical New York Chinatown sewing factory from the 1980s.
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Image
Chinese Garment Worker and Family
Mrs. Ma (third from left) and her family on a 1983 family vacation to Philadelphia and Washington, DC. The Ma family immigrated to the US from Hong Kong in August of 1982.
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Image
1910 Garment Factory
This 1910 garment factory photo looks a little different from the other photographs in this chapter, which were taken in the 1970s—1980s. What are the differences? What are the similarities?
