Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives
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The Tamiment Library is a research library at New York University that documents radical and Left history, with strengths in the histories of communism, socialism, anarchism, the New Left, the Civil Rights Movement, and utopian experiments. The Robert F. Wagner Archives, which is also housed in Bobst Library at NYU, documents American labor history. Together the two units form an important center for scholarly research on Labor and the Left.
The Tamiment Library has a non-circulating collection of about 50,000 books, focusing on politics, political theory, labor, and radical literature and art movements. There are approximately 15,000 non-current periodical titles, including proceedings of labor union conventions, underground newspapers, internal bulletins of radical organizations, and scholarly journals. In addition, the library has a collection of about one million pamphlets and ephemera, including broadsides, leaflets, manifestos, reports, and other documents. The Tamiment Library and Wagner Archives together hold archival collections on organizations and individuals in the labor movement and Left history, with special strengths in the New York City region.
[edit] History
The Tamiment Library was originally founded in 1906 as a part of the Rand School for Social Science, a worker-education school sponsored by the American Socialist Society. The Rand School went into decline as a result of the G.I. Bill following World War II (because young workers had a new way to finance their education), and in 1956 Camp Tamiment, a socialist summer camp, purchased it. In 1963 New York University bought the library from Camp Tamiment. In 1977 the Robert F. Wagner Archives were founded to preserve the records of the local labor movement, and became the repository for the records of the New York City Central Labor Council, its member unions and affiliated organizations.
The archives of the Communist Party USA were donated in March, 2007 to the library. The massive donation, in 12,000 cartons, included history from the founding of the party, 20,000 books and pamphlets, and a million photographs from the archives of the Daily Worker. The library also holds a copy of the microfilmed archive of Communist Party documents from Soviet Archives held by the Library of Congress. [1]
[edit] Notes
- ^ "Communist Party USA Gives Its History to N.Y.U.", article by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times, March 20, 2007
