Academic literature on the topic 'Blackfriars Guild. New York Chapter'

Chapter 2 explores the development of white-collar unionism in New York’s culture industries during the Great Depression. Culture workers responded to the crisis with new organizing initiatives, many of which eventually gravitated toward the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Larger groups of workers received charters from the CIO as affiliated international unions, such as the American Newspaper Guild, with the New York locals containing a substantial share of total national membership. Organizing efforts in cultural fields that were more concentrated in the metropolitan area, like the Book and Magazine Guild and the American Advertising Guild, became local unions within the United Office and Professional Workers of America, which was the CIO affiliate with a general jurisdiction covering white-collar workers. This chapter also examines the important role of women activists in white-collar organizing as well as unionists’ participation in the broader Popular Front social movement of the 1930s.

This chapter discusses the early motivations for the lofts, arguing that the movement emerged at a unique intersection between national discourses on musician empowerment and local urban ecologies specific to late 1960s New York. In 1960s New York, several initiatives began striving toward broader collectivist ideals. These initiatives include the short-lived Jazz Artists' Guild (JAG), the Jazz Composers' Guild (JCG), and the Triumvirate formed by John Coltrane, Babatunde Olatunji, and Yusef Lateef. These examples of 1960s New York collectivism were all rooted in guild and/or trade union strategies. In all three cases, artists envisioned temporarily removing themselves from the commercial market in order to enhance their negotiating leverage as members of a larger movement. Unfortunately, despite their success in generating attention for particular events, none of these groups managed to build an alliance large enough or long-lived enough to realized their principal goals.

Intense debates around spirit photography started immediately upon its discovery in late 1862. This chapter frames these debates around the career, trial, and demise of America’s first and most notorious spirit photographer, William Howard Mumler. In the context of the American Civil War, Mumler claimed to have discovered a gift for photographing spirits of departed souls and immediately became the subject of public interest and scrutiny. His uneasy affiliation with modern Spiritualism, his public ridicule by the photographic guild, and his brief celebrity in the 1860s provide a window into the at times intense uncertainty around the camera’s ability to reveal spiritual truth to modern beholders. His hearing before the New York Police Court in the spring of 1869, in particular, facilitated a very public debate around the authority of the Bible and the camera in newspaper accounts that were circulated throughout the country. In this chapter, spirit photographs emerge as a hinge between corporeal referents in studio portraiture, on the one hand, and practices of biblical beholding, on the other, that asked beholders to see what was really there.