The Tamiment Library's collection of newspapers from labor and activist organizations traces its origins to the library of the Rand School of Social Science, established in 1906. Located just off Union Square in New York City, the Rand School was a workers education institution supported by the Socialist Party of New York, the garment trades unions, the Workman's Circle, and the Jewish Forward Association. The Rand School taught courses in economics, economic history, U.S. history, literature, socialist theory, and labor-management relations. In the mid-1920s the Rand School established a Trade Union Institute to train people interested in careers in trade union organizing and administration. The school also sponsored a vast array of cultural programs: theatre groups, poetry readings, and a workers chorus.

The Rand School's library, which was renamed the Meyer London Memorial Library in 1926, after the Socialist Congressman from Manhattan's Lower East Side, always played an important role in the school. By the 1930s it had one of the finest collections New York City documenting the history of labor and the left. In addition to the book collections many of the unions and progressive organizations associated with the school placed copies of their newspapers, journals, newsletters, leaflets, broadsides, and ephemeral pamphlet literature with the Library. By the end of World War II the Library had a large and growing collection of both current and historical newspapers. However, by the early 1950s the school was in financial trouble and it closed in 1956. For the next seven years the Meyer London Library was maintained with a subsidy from the Tamiment Institute, the educational arm of Camp Tamiment, a socialist summer camp in Pennsylvania's Pocono mountains.

In 1963 the Library was given to New York University. Under NYU administration the Tamiment Library grew rapidly, and today it has nearly 75,000 monograph volumes, a serial collection with more than 8,500 titles, a printed ephemera collection of nearly a million items, and 15,000 linear feet of archives, including personal papers, labor union records, photographs, film, graphics, and oral histories. The newspapers are part of the Library's serial collection. The holdings continue to grow through current subscriptions and donations of historical material.

Sources: