Skip to main content

Michael Nash

We are saddened to report the death of Michael Nash, director of the Tamiment Library at New York University and long-time chief curator of collections at the Hagley Museum and Library (1982-2002). Michael died unexpectedly of a heart attack on July 24, 2012. As his colleague at Hagley and BHC Secretary-Treasurer Roger Horowitz remembers,
He touched many people in the business history world through his interest in history, and even more benefited (and continue to benefit) from his talents because of his extraordinary acquisitions of material for the Hagley archives. The major collections we obtained on Mike's watch included Avon, Seagram, Sperry-Univac, PSFS (Philadelphia Savings Fund Society), Remington Rand, RCA-Camden, the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, and MCI. He also recruited many smaller collections, and expanded our relationships with companies whose records continued to come here while Mike was in charge, such as DuPont and the National Association of Manufacturers. While we always remember to honor the scholars and teachers who created and extended the business history field, too often we do not notice how the raw material for this history became available for scholars to use. . . . [Mike] loved talking at length with the many scholars who came through our doors.
At his more recent post at the Tamiment Library, Nash turned his focus to the documentation of labor and radical movements. Among his many achievements there, he obtained the archives of the Communist Party, USA, as well as the complete records and pictorial collection of its paper, The Daily Worker (you can hear Mike discussing the CPA acquisition on NPR here.). He also secured the archives of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (from the Spanish Civil War). James D. Fernández of the ALB commented, "He was a remarkably learned teacher and scholar who wore his erudition lightly; a generous and gentle archivist always eager to help others; a principled and committed man whose teaching and scholarship and stewardship of Tamiment were of a piece with his lifelong dedication to the promotion, via historical understanding, of human rights and social justice."
   In addition to dozens of finding aids, guides, and exhibit materials related to business and labor history, Michael Nash was also the author of Conflict and Accommodation: Coal Miners, Steel Workers and Socialism (1982) and co-editor of The Good Fight Continues: World War II Letters from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (2006).
   Business and labor historians will miss his amazing collection development skills and his vast enthusiasm, but Michael Nash will be most remembered, as Roger Horowitz notes, as "a good man, a proud father, and a caring friend."
   Update, August 10: See also the tributes by Lynn Catanese of the Hagley and by Norman Markowitz of People's World.

Popular posts from this blog

The Exchange has moved to the BHC's website

  Dear members subscribers of The Exchange   The Exchange, the weblog of the BHC, is now part of our website ( https://thebhc.org ). We migrated the blog to serve our membership and interested parties best since Blogger is discontinuing its email service.   Note that this will be the last message we will send from Blogger .   The Exchange was founded by Pat Denault over a decade ago, and it has become an essential channel for announcements from and about the BHC and from our subscribers and members. Announcements from The Exchange will come up on the News section of our website as they did before. However, if you wish to receive these announcements via email, and you have not done so yet, please subscribe to The Exchange by: Going to our website's homepage ( https://thebhc.org ), s crolling down to the end of the page, and clicking on "Subscribe to the Latest BHC News." Or go to the “News” section of our website's homepage ( https://thebhc.org/ ),   and click on “The

Regina Blaszczyk on the Business of Color

In September, MIT Press published Regina Lee Blaszczyk 's book, The Color Revolution , in which she "traces the relationship of color and commerce, from haute couture to automobile showrooms to interior design, describing the often unrecognized role of the color profession in consumer culture." Readers can see some of the 121 color illustrations featured in the book at the MIT PressLog here and here . The author has recently written an essay on her research for the book in the Hagley Archives for the Hagley Library and Archives newsletter.    Reviews can be found in the New York Times , The Atlantic , Leonardo , and Imprint ; one can listen to an audio interview with Reggie Blaszczyk, and read her posts, "How Auto Shows Sparked a Color Revolution" on the Echoes blog and "True Blue: DuPont and the Color Revolution" on the Chemical Heritage Foundation website . Also available is a CHF video of the author discussing another excerpt from her rese

New resource available: Business history and race: a partial, open bibliography

Business history and race: a partial, open bibliography The Business History Conference is working to facilitate the creation of a bibliography of scholarly work on race and business history. We hope that the bibliography will serve as a resource for those seeking to create more inclusive syllabi and understand the historical context for our present moment of reckoning with structural racism in the United States and across the globe. The bibliography is crowdsourced and draws on the collective expertise of the BHC membership. The BHC wishes to expand the list of references already curated and invites your contributions to the bibliography (The current list of references contains 154 titles). Submit your suggestions by (a) emailing additional references to Anne Fleming of the BHC Electronic Media Oversight Committee <acf80 at law.georgetown.ed> or BHC Web Editor Paula de la Cruz-Fernandez <padelacruzf at gmail.com>, (b) tweeting titles to @TheBHCNews or (c) adding it