Excerpt from History of Labour in the United States, Vol. 1 The organisation of the Department of Economics and Sociology of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and its general plan for studying the economic history of the United States were explained in the writer's introduction to Professor Johnson's History of Commerce two years ago. As there stated, the subject was taken up by topics, and twelve divisions were formed, each being placed in charge of an economist selected for his familiarity with the field assigned to him. Within each division, it was designed to secure carefully prepared monographs on topics not yet adequately treated in our economic or historical literature, and later to prepare, on the basis of this foundation work, a comprehensive treatise covering the subject matter of the division. The twelve heads of divisions formed a board of collaborators which met periodically for consultation, and whose chairman attended to the administrative work and acted as supervising editor of their publications. In some instances, this scheme was modified to meet the problems and needs of the several divisions, and its progress was retarded by the great amount of material to be collected and utilised, by the difficulty of securing competent scholars to make the studies, and by the competing demands made upon the collaborators, no one of whom could devote more than a part of his time to the work. However, we have secured the preparation of over 170 monographic studies, of which 65 have been published, in addition to elaborate indices of the economic material found in the documents of thirteen of our States and a considerable number of studies published in magazines. Full details may be found in our bibliography, the third edition of which, covering nineteen pages, was issued in 1914. The publication of the divisional histories began in 1915 with the History of Commerce by Professor Johnson and colleagues. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.