James Rivington: Music Purveyor in Revolutionary New York
By Lance Boos
Printer and bookseller James Rivington arrived in New York in the autumn of 1760 with a hoard of books, pamphlets, sheet music, and instruments ready for sale. Rivington (the namesake of Rivington Street in lower Manhattan) went on to become a prominent figure in New York: he was a fervent Loyalist propagandist during the American Revolution, a spy for the Americans late in the war, and one of the first merchants in the American colonies to import and advertise a significant amount of music.
“Completion by Contrast”: Architecture and Sculpture in Postwar New York
By Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins
In the March 30, 1963 issue of the New Yorker, art critic and historian Calvin Tomkins profiled sculptor Richard Lippold, whom he described as “by all odds, the busiest artist now working predominantly in collaboration with architects.”
Alice Neel believed that “art is a form of history.” Born in 1900, she claimed that “I represent the 20th century… I’ve tried to capture the zeitgeist.” Yet her painting bore no resemblance to the vast canvases of iconic scenes from the French revolution by Jacques-Louis David, Anne-Louis Girodot, or Theodore Gericault. Instead, she portrayed the history of the 20th century through individual people — neighbors, friends, artists, celebrities, and political activists — that she knew in New York City, a city which might be considered the capital of the 20th-century — the successor to Paris as “the capital of the 19th-century.”
Dead Rivers and Day’s End: Cruising and Preserving New York’s Queer Imaginaries
By Fiona Anderson
Whenever I’m in New York, I make a point of spending time looking at the wooden pilings that stand in the Hudson, remnants of the warehouses and piers that occupied the waterfront until the mid-1980s. Gathered together in intimate coalition, they jut up and out along the riverside like rugged swimmers leaping in to rescue a drowning comrade. They look both like placeholders for future construction and hardy traces of a long-lost culture, like a forgotten work by Robert Smithson or an American Pompeii. This area is the subject of my recent book Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago Press, 2019),which looks at how and why this site hosted a vibrant cruising scene and art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The Chinese Lady: An Interview with Nancy E. Davis
Interviewed by Hongdeng Gao
Today on the blog, editor Hongdeng Gao speaks to Nancy E. Davis about her recent book, The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America. Through creative use of disparate sources from many years of research, Davis captures the experiences of Afong Moy — the first recognized Chinese woman to arrive in America — as she introduced exotic goods from the East, as well as Chinese life, to the American public. The book provides rich insights into how Afong Moy’s presence changed Americans’ views of China and influenced American popular and material culture. It also sheds light on New York City’s role in the early US-China trade and the rise of the global marketplace.
The First Cinemas in Black Harlem: A Look at the Silent Film Era, 1909-1926
By Agata Frymus
The history of cinemas in Harlem is as old — or, in fact a few years older — than its history as a lively center of Black life. Movie houses that opened their doors to African Americans in the late 1900s and early 1910s offer a fascinating insight into the history of Harlem’s residents.
The Pornographic Archive and New York City History
Reviewed by Jeffrey Patrick Colgan
Certain significant portions of New York City’s history are indelibly linked to the production and consumption of hardcore pornography, and, conversely, the history of hardcore is without a doubt indebted to the city’s artistic, cultural, and economic history. Following the 1957 Roth v. United States ruling — which concerned New York City bookseller Samuel Roth and resulted in a narrower definition of obscenity — a series of Supreme Court decisions liberalized the production and exhibition of pornography and ushered in the so-called Golden Age of Porn. New York City was at the center of this pornographic revolution, where movies with explicit penetrative sex (aka hardcore) received wide, albeit controversial, theatrical distribution.
“The presentation of the civic and commercial life of the city”: May King Van Rensselaer and the founding of the Museum of the City of New York
By Alena Buis
At the January 2, 1917 annual meeting of the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS), May King Van Rensselaer (1848-1925) delivered a passionate speech. Addressing the organization’s staid (and at that point startled) representatives she proclaimed: “I have been attending the meetings of the New-York Historical Society for nearly three years, and have not heard one new or advanced scientific thought, although many distinguished scholars have visited the city.”
Marriage, Failure, and Exile: H.P. Lovecraft in New York
By David J. Goodwin
Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft is identified with his native city of Providence, Rhode Island and greater New England. That region — its geography, architecture, history, and lore — stood as the primary connective tissue of many of his best conceived and most popular stories, such as “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Colour Out of Space,” and “The Whisperer in Darkness.” Lovecraft once declared, “Few persons have ever been as closely knit to New England’s rock-ribbed hills as I.” He spent all of his adult life living and writing in a single Providence neighborhood with one notable exception — his two years in New York City between 1924 and 1926.
“She Wiggled Her Body in the Most Suggestive and Obscene Manner”: Sexuality and Respectability in the West Indian Labor Day Parade
By Marlene H. Gaynair
During the long 20th century, Caribbean carnival traditions and celebrations dispersed throughout the Atlantic World as West Indians migrated and settled in new locales. Carnival was not just limited to the Lenten period like in Trinidad and Tobago, Brazil, and New Orleans, but also took place around August 1st in the British Caribbean diaspora as a celebration for harvest and Emancipation. In New York City, the significant Caribbean community would recreate carnival celebrations in Trinidad and Tobago as the world-famous West Indian Labor Day Parade.
