The International Institute of Social History (IISH/IISG) is one of the largest

archive An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or ...

s of labor and

social history Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...

in the world. Located in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the Capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population ...

, its one million volumes and 2,300 archival collections include the papers of major figures and institutions in radical leftist thought. The IISH was founded in 1935 by Nicolaas Posthumus as an independent scientific institute. It is part of the

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences ( nl, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, abbreviated: KNAW) is an organization dedicated to the advancement of science and literature in the Netherlands. The academy is housed ...

Collections

The International Institute of Social History specializes in international labor and social history, including that of the Netherlands. As of 2000, it holds one million volumes, 80,000 audiovisual items, 2,400 serials, three million digital files, and 30,000 linear feet of manuscripts across 2,300 collections. Among the latter are institutional collections from

Amnesty International Amnesty International (also referred to as Amnesty or AI) is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The organization says it has more than ten million members and sup ...

Confederación Nacional del Trabajo The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo ( en, National Confederation of Labor; CNT) is a Spanish confederation of anarcho-syndicalist labor unions, which was long affiliated with the International Workers' Association (AIT). When working wi ...

and

Federación Anarquista Ibérica The Iberian Anarchist Federation ( es, Federación Anarquista Ibérica, FAI) is a Spanish organization of anarchist militants active within affinity groups in the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) anarcho-syndicalist union. It is often ...

, the

European Trade Union Confederation The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) is the major trade union organisation representing workers at the European level. In its role as a European social partner, the ETUC works both in a consulting role with the European Commission and n ...

Freedom Press Freedom Press is an anarchist publishing house and bookseller in Whitechapel, London, United Kingdom. Founded in 1886, it is the largest anarchist publishing house in the country and the oldest of its kind in the English speaking world. It is bas ...

Greenpeace International Greenpeace is an independent global campaigning network, founded in Canada in 1971 by Irving Stowe and Dorothy Stowe, immigrant environmental activists from the United States. Greenpeace states its goal is to "ensure the ability of the Earth t ...

, the

International Confederation of Free Trade Unions The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) was an international trade union. It came into being on 7 December 1949 following a split within the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), and was dissolved on 31 October 2006 when ...

, Russian

Socialist Revolutionary Party The Socialist Revolutionary Party, or the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries (the SRs, , or Esers, russian: эсеры, translit=esery, label=none; russian: Партия социалистов-революционеров, ), was a major politi ...

Socialist International The Socialist International (SI) is a political international or worldwide organisation of political parties which seek to establish democratic socialism. It consists mostly of socialist and labour-oriented political parties and organisations. ...

, and the personal papers of

Emma Goldman Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) was a Russian-born anarchist political activist and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the ...

Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...

, Max Nettlau,

Lev Trotsky Lev Davidovich Bronstein. ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky; uk, link= no, Лев Давидович Троцький; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trotskij'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky''. (), was a Russian M ...

Karl Kautsky Karl Johann Kautsky (; ; 16 October 1854 – 17 October 1938) was a Czech-Austrian philosopher, journalist, and Marxist theorist. Kautsky was one of the most authoritative promulgators of orthodox Marxism after the death of Friedrich Engels in ...

Ernest Mandel Ernest Ezra Mandel (; also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter (5 April 1923 – 20 July 1995), was a Belgian Marxian economist, Trotskyist activist and theorist, and Holocaust survivor. He fo ...

, and

Sylvia Pankhurst Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (5 May 1882 – 27 September 1960) was a campaigning English feminist and socialist. Committed to organising working-class women in London's East End, and unwilling in 1914 to enter into a wartime political truce with ...

. The institute is the foremost repository of anarchist documents in the world.

History

Nicolaas Posthumus, a socialist and first chair appointment in economic history in the Netherlands, founded the International Institute of Social History in 1935. To examine how

labour relations Labor relations is a field of study that can have different meanings depending on the context in which it is used. In an international context, it is a subfield of labor history that studies the human relations with regard to work in its broadest ...

develop over time, IISG collected archives from all over the world. During the first years Posthumus succeeded in obtaining many papers from anarchists (

Bakunin Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (; 1814–1876) was a Russian revolutionary anarchist, socialist and founder of collectivist anarchism. He is considered among the most influential figures of anarchism and a major founder of the revolutionary ...

manuscripts), other

socialist Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the e ...

and

social democratic Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote soci ...

and

Marxist Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...

movements from Germany and Russia. Before the Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940, Posthumus was able to move the most valuable archives to London. During the war, many remaining IISG archives were transported to Nazi Germany. They were not destroyed. Most of the papers were rediscovered in Hannover in 1946, and some other parts were later found in archives in Moscow in 1991, and returned to Amsterdam. In 1989 the International Institute of Social History moved to new premises: an old warehouse at the Cruquiusweg in the eastern part of Amsterdam. This building also housed the

Press Museum The Press Museum ( nl, Persmuseum) is a museum of journalistic heritage in Amsterdam, Netherlands, that became part of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in 2017. History The museum ( nl, Persmuseum, links=no) was established in 19 ...

but in 2017 that museum became a part of the Dutch Institute for Image and Sound (Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid) in Hilversum. They host most of the

IHLIA_LGBT_Heritage IHLIA LGBT Heritage, formerly known as the International Gay/Lesbian Information Center and Archive ( nl, Internationaal Homo/Lesbisch Informatiecentrum en Archief; IHLIA), is an international archive and documentation center on homosexuality, bi ...

collection (LGBT Archives). Bakunin Membership Card.jpg, Bakunin Archives (IISG) Iishmarx.jpg, Communist Manifesto (Marx)

References

Bibliography

External links

*
Index to the Archives of the IISH

Archive
about the IISH's own history {{Authority control Archives in the Netherlands Social history Research institutes in the Netherlands

Collections

History

See also

References

Bibliography

Further reading

External links