Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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Newsjunkie.net is a resource guide for journalists. We show who's behind the news, and provide tools to help navigate the modern business of information.
Use of Data
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The International Institute of Social History (IISH; Dutch: Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, IISG) is one of the world's largest archives of labor and social history, located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It was founded on November 25, 1935, by Nicolaas Wilhelmus Posthumus, a pioneer of modern economic history in the Netherlands, as an independent scientific institute. Since 1979, the IISH has been an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).
Posthumus conceived the IISH in the context of his earlier work establishing the Netherlands Economic History Archive (NEHA) in 1914. He recognized the need to preserve the archives and libraries of socialist, anarchist, and labor movement organizations that faced political persecution. During its early years the institute acquired foundational collections including the papers of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Max Nettlau anarchist collection, Bakunin manuscripts, and the archives of the Spanish trade union Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). During World War II, Posthumus transferred the most valuable archives to London before the German occupation; the remaining materials were seized by the Nazis but mostly recovered after the war, with some materials returned from Moscow as late as 1991. In 1989, the institute moved to its current premises, a former cocoa warehouse on Cruquiusweg in Amsterdam's eastern harbor district.
The IISH holds over one million printed volumes, 5,445 archival collections, approximately 80,000 audiovisual items, 2,400 serial publications, and three million digital files. The archival collections span more than 50 linear kilometres and cover the history of labor movements, social and emancipatory movements, radical leftist thought, and related topics from around the world. Key collections include the Marx-Engels archive, papers of Emma Goldman, and institutional records of Amnesty International and the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo. The IISH is also one of the world's leading data centers for socio-economic history, maintaining extensive datasets on demography, wages, prices, inequality, and labor relations.
The institute operates a research program organized around four clusters: Global Labour Relations; Commodities, Environment and Labour; Social and Economic Inequality; and Individual and Collective Action. The Reading Room is open Monday to Thursday, 9:00–17:00, and researchers can request materials through the online catalogue at search.iisg.amsterdam. The IISH's collections are accessible online as much as possible.