On this day in labor history, the year was 1942.

That was the day the completion of the Alaskan Highway or Alcan, was celebrated at Soldier’s Summit.

There had been proposals for a highway connecting the United States to Alaska since the early 1920s.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt moved quickly to organize its approval and construction.

By March 1942, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers broke ground on the $138 million project.

More than 10,000 troops were assigned to highway construction.

Over a third were comprised of newly formed black regiments.

Thousands of pieces of construction equipment were moved through the railroads, including steam shovels, blade graders, tractors, trucks, bulldozers, snowplows, cranes and generators.

In a matter of eight months, workers carved out 1700 miles of road between Dawson Creek, British Columbia, through the Yukon to Delta Junction in Alaska, under the most treacherous environmental conditions.

Workers arrived in wintery Dawson Creek, pitching their sleeping quarters in snowdrifts.

By spring , workers battled flooding rivers, equipment sinking into thick mud and fears of Japanese bombers.

By summer, mosquitoes, dubbed “bush bombers,” were so bad workers had to eat under netting.

Black workers also battled relentless racism.

The Army was still segregated.

Black troops faced racist presumptions about their capacity to carry out hard labor.

They were determined to break down stereotypes.

By fall, white and black bulldozer drivers coordinating the work together were celebrated in the pages of the Army’s Yank magazine, Time and the New York Times.

Some historians consider the integrated work crews a factor in President Truman’s later move to desegregate the armed forces.

According to The New York Times, the Federal Highway Administration calls the Alcan “the road to civil rights.”

On this day in labor history, the year was 1896.

That was the day anarchist and labor activist Rose Pesotta was born.

Her name, Rakhel Peisoty, was changed, like so many others’, at Ellis Island.

She had fled tsarist Russia in 1913 as a teenager and soon found work in New York City’s garment shops.

She readily joined the ILGWU, becoming a national organizer by 1920.

In the late 1920s, Rose went to Los Angeles in an attempt to organize Latina sweatshop workers.

There she helped women workers establish a bilingual labor journal and assisted them in winning a key strike for recognition and higher wages in 1933.

She soon ascended to the position of union vice president and worked closely with the newly formed CIO.

Rose traveled far and wide to organize garment workers.

She led successful strikes throughout the United States and in Montreal and Puerto Rico.

By 1936, she was on the picket lines with striking rubber workers in Akron, Ohio and autoworkers in Flint, Michigan.

She increasingly found herself at odds with ILGWU head, David Dubinsky and other top male union officials over persistent sexism, her radical politics and her opposition to the no-strike pledge during World War II.

Rose resented the fact that though women comprised the overwhelming majority of the union’s membership, she continued to be the only woman union officer.

Frustrated by the chauvinism she experienced, Rose resigned from her post as vice president and later from the ILGWU executive board in 1944.

She continued as a sewing machine operator, remained active at the local level and published two memoirs.

Later in life, she aligned herself with the Civil Rights Movement.

Rose Pesotta died of cancer in 1965.

On this day in labor history, the year was 1863.

That was the day President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address.

It is considered one of Lincoln’s greatest speeches.

Generations of students have been assigned to commit it to memory.

The two-minute speech carries a deep significance in our country’s history.

Lincoln delivered the speech at the dedication of the Soldiers National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Four months earlier, the Union had defeated Confederate forces at the Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War.

Casualties on both sides totaled nearly 50,000 over the course of the three-day battle.

This battle, coupled with the fall of Vicksburg, is often considered a turning point in the war to end the slave labor system.

Lincoln’s speech served to redefine the war’s purpose.

Originally, the emphasis had been one of preserving the Union.

Now, Lincoln drew upon the Declaration of Independence to also highlight the national struggle for human equality.

Lincoln began his speech with the acknowledgment that the nation was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

He ended the Gettysburg Address stating, “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.”

Most Republicans praised the speech.

But historian Eric Foner notes in his biography of Lincoln, that “many Democrats denounced Lincoln for unilaterally redefining the war’s purpose, which they insisted, had nothing to do with equality.”

In 2015, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation published an edited volume, Gettysburg Replies.

It features 272-word essays by presidents, historians, poets, actors, scientists and others about the lasting influence of the Gettysburg Address.