In the final episode of the fall season of Doc Chat, held on December 3, 2020, an engaged group of Doc Chatters dug into the stories behind photographs of radical demonstrations in early 20th-century New York City.

An ongoing series from NYPL's Center for Research in the Humanities, Doc Chat pairs an NYPL curator or specialist and a scholar to discuss evocative digitized items from the Library's collections and brainstorm innovative ways of teaching with them. In Episode 12, NYPL's Nora Dolliver and Julie Herrada, curator of the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, zoomed in on a series of photos by Percy Loomis Sperr and placed them in the context of the photographer's life and work and of the politics of early 20th-century New York.

A transcript of this event is available here.

Below are some handy links to materials and sources suggested in the episode. 

Episode Twelve: Primary Sources

The photographs that Nora and Julie analyzed:

Episode Twelve: Readings and Resources 

Anatole Dolgoff, Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff (AK Press, 2016).

Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution: Italian Women's Resistance and Radicalism  in New York City (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

Britt Haas, Fighting Authoritarianism: American Youth Activism in the 1930s (Fordham University Press, 2018).

Bruce Kayton, Radical Walking Tours of New York City (Seven Stories Press, 2016).

Communist Historical Newspaper Collection: (NYPL library card required). This searchable database provides full-text access to Communist newspapers published in the United States, including The Daily Worker.

CPUSA: Ninety Years of History: This Flickr album from NYU’s Tamiment Library is a companion to their 2007 exhibition showcasing the papers of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), a collection that they had acquired that year. 

Faces of the First Red Scare: This resource from historian Kenyon Zimmer profiles and indexes hundreds of people who were deported from the US between 1918 and 1925 due to their involvement (or suspected involvement) in radical political movements.

Labadie Political Poster Collection: This collection from the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan is searchable and browseable by topic.

Usehistory.org: This Columbia University website looks dated and hasn't been updated recently, but its creators have amassed a fantastic collection of photos and newspaper articles related to the labor history of New York City's Union Square. The site also includes a few oral histories. Scroll down to the very bottom of the page for a Teachers Guide with some guidance on how the materials might be used in the classroom.

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Doc Chat's Fall season has wrapped! You can catch up on past episodes on the NYPL blog. We're busy planning an exciting Spring 2021 season, so make sure you don't miss an episode by signing up for NYPL's Research newsletter.