On the Exhibit

This exhibit was built to revisit the labor struggles of maritime workers in New York City. The flyers were found in the SCI archives, which contains a comprehensive scrapbook collection. All images in the exhibit were scanned from the "Sep 1924-Jan 1934" scrapbook, which contains many flyers, news articles, and internal memos about the unrest on the waterfront.

"Labor Issues on New York's Waterfront: A Visual History" was created by Alexandra Dolan-Mescal, a graduate student in the Library and Information Studies program at Queens College, the City University of New York. The SCI scrapbook collection is housed at Queens College. The labor struggles of the maritime industry remain relatively obscure, but the documentations are out there, waiting to be explored and publicized.

Further Reading

Fink, Leon. (2011). Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World's First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press

Lannon, Albert Vetere. (1999). Second String red: The Life of Al Lannon, American Communist. Lanham: Lexington Books

Nelson, Bruce. (1990). Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press

Standard, William L. (1947). Merchant Seamen: A Short History of Their Struggles. New York: International Publishers

Valtin, Jan. (1941). Out of the Night. USA: Alliance Book Corporation