Michael H. Nash

Michael Nash died on July 24, 2012, of a pulmonary embolism. He was 66 years old at the time of his death. At the end of his life he was working with the Occupy Wall Street movement in both safeguarding their developing collections for history and encouraging and using his knowledge of peoples movements to advise them on strategy and tactics. His legacy lives on in his work, the ongoing work of the Tamiment Library, and the deep affection that so many people felt for him over the decades. Few individuals combined the personal and the political as positively as Michael Nash. Few have really been scholars, teachers and activists as he had been.

In March 2007 Nash was instrumental in arranging the transfer of the Reference Center for Marxist Studies (RCMS), the archive and library of the Communist Party USA, to NYU. Included in this material were some 20,000 books, 5,000 magazines, a complete run of party newspaper The Daily Worker, every party pamphlet ever produced, and the 1 million image photo archive of The Daily Worker and its successor publications.

Nash came to New York University in the middle of 2002 to take a position as Director of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, a specialized labor history collection housed at the university. Nash regarded this as "the dream job of his life" and remained in this position until the time of his death in 2012.

Upon completion of his MLS, Nash returned to Binghamton University to complete his PhD in American Labor History under the tutelage of historian Melvyn Dubofsky, earning the degree in 1975. More years would pass before his dissertation subject, an attempt to demonstrate the emergence of American workers in heavy industry "into something resembling a class-conscious proletariat," would find print. This work, Conflict and Accommodation: Coal Miners, Steel Workers, and Socialism, 1890-1920, was published by Greenwood Press in 1982.

With his scholarly writing occupying his free time, Nash began his career as an archival specialist at the New York Public Library in 1974, a position in which he remained for 6 years. Nash subsequently moved to assume a position as Assistant Archivist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. At Cornell Nash worked in the library of School of Industrial and Labor Relations, a position which lost its funding in 1982, forcing another change of employment.

Nash attended Harpur College, today known as Binghamton University, in Vestal, New York, from which he graduated with a B.A. degree in History in 1968. Nash then enrolled in Columbia University in New York City, earning a M.A. in American History in 1969. Nash began work on a PhD in labor history, beginning a study of the political behavior of coal miners and steel workers during the progressive era. Nash was discouraged both by the magnitude of the project he visualized and the job market for labor historians, however, so he took steps towards becoming a professional archivist, earning a Master of Library Science degree in 1974.

Nash was instrumental in the organization and expansion of this collection, which had its roots in the collection of the Socialist Party's Rand School of Social Science until its acquisition by NYU in 1963.

Michael Harold "Mike" Nash (1946-2012) was an American labor historian, librarian, and archivist. Nash was the Director of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives at New York University throughout the early years of the 21st Century until the time of his death. Nash is best remembered for the key role he played in first obtaining and then integrating the archives of the Communist Party USA into Tamiment Library's holdings, in addition to other acquisition projects.

Michael Harold Nash was born in 1946 in The Bronx area of New York City. Nash was raised as a red diaper baby as both his parents were school teachers with radical political views. His father Julius Nash, a science teacher, suffered job discrimination during the Cold War of anti-communism, having been removed from his teaching job in 1955 as part of a far reaching purge and blacklist of Communist and former Communist teachers in the New York City School system.