Business records (financial, stock, and customer order files), manuscripts, author information, and publishing, production, and promotion information for the Charles H. Kerr Company, the oldest labor and socialist publishing house in the United States. The collections also includes some information about The Socialist Party, The Proletarian Party, unions, and radical organizations, primarily in the United States.

Publications, official documents, song books, and other materials created by and related to the Industrial Workers of the World, an historic union and labor organization.

Research notes, photocopies, drafts, proofs, photographs, and correspondence comprising the papers used to research and produce the Haymarket Scrapbook, edited by Franklin Rosemont and Dave Roediger (Charles H. Kerr Pub. Co., 1986). Also materials related to the activities commemorating the centennial of the 1886-1887 Haymarket Affair.

Original manuscript writings by noted IWW member T-Bone Slim with research notes, book drafts, and correspondence from Franklin Rosemont used to produce his book, “Juice is Stranger than Friction: Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim” (Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1992).

Book reviews, flyers, articles, photographs, letters, and periodicals stemming from Franklin Rosemont's surrealist, leftist, and labor activities, including the Charles H. Kerr Co.

A variety of files concerning the Chicago Typographical Union (Local 16), and its parent organization the International Typographical Union, compiled by the Union's unofficial historian, Henry Rosemont. Includes ephemera, manuscript and printed materials relating to the union activities, Rosemont's research notebooks about unions and union history, and information about other labor and trade groups. There is extensive information about the Chicago newspaper strike of 1947-1949.

Compiled by Chicago-based Franklin Rosemont and donated by his wife, Penelope Rosemont, this collection consists of pamphlets, wall posters, and periodicals focusing on the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the 1968 Democratic convention.