Tamiment Library The Tamiment Library was founded in 1906 as a part of the
Rand School of Social Science, a worker-education school sponsored by the
American Socialist Society and modeled after the workers’ school at Ruskin College, Oxford, England. The Library was named the
Meyer London Library after the long-time Socialist who represented the
Lower East Side of Manhattan, and only acquired its current name in the late 1970s. From its first days,
Camp Tamiment, a theater
summer camp established in 1921 in the
Poconos by people associated with the School, began to support the New York institution. Between 1937 and 1956, the Camp paid from 50 to 75 percent of the School's expenses. In 1956, Camp Tamiment purchased the School, then closed it and attempted to integrate its educational and cultural programs into the Tamiment Institute. The Library remained open and was renamed the Ben Josephson Library, after the Camp's managing director. In 1963, the Tamiment Library was donated to New York University (NYU) following the revocation of tax-exempt status of Camp Tamiment by the
Internal Revenue Service. NYU saw the addition of the Tamiment collection as a means to expand its scope as a research library. By the late 1970s the location of the collection had moved to
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library of NYU. Staff hiring was broadly ecumenical, including collection assistants Ethel Lobman, a longtime member of the
Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and Peter Filardo, formerly an employee of the
Communist Party-associated
American Institute for Marxist Studies, founded by historian
Herbert Aptheker.
Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives The idea for a single archive to preserve the records of New York City's vibrant trade union movement was first advanced in the early 1970s by Stephen Charney Vladeck, son of Socialist trade union activist
Baruch Charney Vladeck. Vladeck, a prominent labor lawyer, was concerned about inadequate scholarship and teaching about the history of the labor movement and saw the need for establishment of a central repository for historical documents. The Central Labor Council's support was especially critical to the success of the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives as was the use of the Wagner name, as it gave mainstream legitimacy to the effort and helped to motivate several fairly conservative unions to provide document accessions to the collection. The "Tamiment" name had been closely associated with the Socialist Party and New York University was not perceived as friendly to the interests of organized labor – a pair of potential stumbling blocks which were neatly alleviated by the alternative name and official support of the CLC. Succeeding Cary at the helm of the Labor Archive was labor historian Debra Bernhardt, who later took over for Dorothy Swanson as head of the combined Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives. Bernhardt died in 2001 at the age of 47 and was in turn succeeded, following an extensive search, by labor historian and archivist
Michael H. Nash in 2002.
Major acquisitions The
Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) collection, formerly located at Brandeis University, was acquired by the Tamiment Library in 2001. The collection is the largest and most important resource for the study of the participation of American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. It includes the papers of more than 200 volunteers, oral histories, films, photographs, posters, and selections of the microfilmed records of the International Brigades that were taken to the Soviet Union after the Spanish Civil War. In March 2007, the archives of the
Communist Party USA were donated to the library. The massive donation came in over 2,000 cartons, and included 20,000 books and pamphlets – some of which dated from the founding of the party – as well as thousands of photographs from the archives of the
Daily Worker. The library also holds a copy of the microfilmed archive of Communist Party documents from
Russian State Archives of Social and Political History held by the
Library of Congress. Also notable was the acquisition of the papers of former
Central Intelligence Agency officer
Philip Agee, a defector to
Cuba, as well as the papers of black civil rights activists
Esther and James Jackson,
Nation magazine editor
Victor Navasky, and papers of radical lawyer
William Kunstler and historian
Howard Zinn.
Collection in the 21st century As of 2013, the collection of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives included more than 100,000
pamphlets, as well as other radical ephemera. ==See also==