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Debra Bernhardt, Historian for the Unsung, Dies at 47
By MARGALIT FOX
Debra E. Bernhardt, a labor historian who spearheaded a successful three-year drive to obtain landmark status for Union Square Park in Manhattan, died on Thursday at her home in Brooklyn. She was 47.
The cause was cancer, said her sister, Andra Bernhardt Ladd.
The head of the Tamiment Library and the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, Dr. Bernhardt devoted her career to documenting the lives of the largely unsung men and women who built New York City and, day in and day out, nudged it along: sandhogs and seamstresses, pipe fitters and child welfare workers, secretaries and short-order cooks.
She was the author, with Rachel Bernstein, of "Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives" (New York University Press, 2000), a book of photographs and oral histories of working New Yorkers that grew out of an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of the City of New York.
At her death, Dr. Bernhardt was at work on Labor Arts, a Web site devoted to the art and artifacts of working people, scheduled to make its debut in May.
As a public historian, Dr. Bernhardt immersed herself in the kinds of workaday narratives that traditional academic historians, with their eyes trained on the powerful, often overlook. She described her work as "documenting the undocumented," a phrase that neatly encapsulated the particular challenge of public history: how to chronicle the lives of people not in the habit of generating collections of personal papers, boxed and ready for posterity.
But what these people did have was stuff — leaflets, lapel buttons, picket signs and photographs — and part of Dr. Bernhardt's job was to persuade them that each of these dusty artifacts was a window on a bygone union election, organizing drive or strike; she would acquire many of them for the Tamiment Library, a research collection devoted to radical movements in the United States from the Civil War onward, as well as for the Wagner Archives, dedicated to labor studies.
"The dustbin of history is lighter because of her," said Miriam Frank, a colleague at N.Y.U.
Debra Ellen Bernhardt was born on May 9, 1953, in Nuremberg, West Germany, where her parents were civilian employees of the United States Army; she was raised in Iron River, Mich., where several members of her Danish-American family worked in the iron mines. She received a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan, a master's from Wayne State University and, in 1988, one of the first doctorates from N.Y.U. in public history.
In conjunction with her dissertation, she produced "New Yorkers at Work," an eight-part series broadcast on National Public Radio. In 1995, Dr. Bernhardt received the John Commerford Award, the highest honor of the New York Labor History Association, and, this year, the Distinguished Service Award from the New York City Central Labor Council.
Dr. Bernhardt is survived by her sister, of Lafayette, La.; her parents, Harold and Marcia Bernhardt, of Iron River; and by her husband, Jonathan Bloom, and her children, Alexander and Sonia, all of Brooklyn.
Despite her professional prominence, Dr. Bernhardt remained intensely proud of her own working- class roots. She sang in the New York City Labor Chorus; her business cards bore the logo of the union shop that printed them, as did her son's bar mitzvah invitations. She was known to her friends as Debs — shorthand not only for Debra, but also for Eugene V.
And it was largely as a result of Dr. Bernhardt's efforts that in September 1998, Union Square Park was declared a national historic landmark by the National Park Service. The square was the cradle of American labor history — a perennial home to anarchists, Communists, socialists, unionists and assorted rabble-rousing orators, and the site, in 1882, of what was later recognized as the first Labor Day parade.
"No one realizes that the eight- hour day was won by working people on these streets, in this park," Dr. Bernhardt told The New York Times in 1998, as she sat in Union Square, once ringed by union halls and threadbare left-wing publishers and now by upscale restaurants and chain retailers. "We wanted to celebrate the fact that ordinary people were able to express their rights to free speech and assembly on this spot."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/26/nyregion/26BERN.html?ex=986651846&ei=1& en=c62dbbd5986f70c6
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Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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