Poster for “New Yorkers at Work,” 1981. (Mouse over image to see detail.)
Oral Historian
The first New Yorkers at Work project documented undocumented stories about work in NYC through oral history, with Bernhardt and others conducting over 150 oral history interviews with workers and union activists in industries representative of the city’s economy.
Bernhardt, in collaboration with staffers and historians, crafted a series of eight documentary radio programs from the hundreds of hours of taped interviews. The New Yorkers at Work programs were broadcast over National Public Radio, and subsequently packaged as a set of cassette tapes with accompanying study guides for each program and distributed to schools and libraries in NYC.