Paper of Wreckage: A History of the New York Post
March 19, 2025

By the 1970s, the New York Post had fallen on hard times, along with the city. When the newspaper sold to a largely unknown Australian named Rupert Murdoch, staffers hoped it would be the start of a new golden age. But today media often reflects what began then, when the oldest newspaper in America was turned into a noisy tabloid.

In Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media, Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo show us how we got here. The former Post writers and editors have compiled a jaw-dropping oral history of the paper and its cultural impact as recounted by the men and women who saw it firsthand. It’s a “rollicking tale” of bad behavior and inflated egos, operating by a corporate culture that rewarded skirting the rules and breaking norms: “A deeply fascinating — and considerably unsettling — look at the way American journalism has been transformed over the past five decades” (Booklist).

Mike Jaccarino, author of America's Last Great Newspaper War: The Death of Print in a Two-Tabloid Town, joins in conversation.

The Met: A History of the Museum and Its People
February 25, 2025

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s greatest cultural institutions, with paintings, sculptures, costumes, and instruments that span millennia, from ancient Egypt and Greece to modern European and American artists. But how did it amass this trove, and what do the experiences of the people who bought, restored, catalogued, visited, and watched over these works tell us about the museum? In this groundbreaking bottom-up history, Jonathan Conlin, professor at the University of Southampton, explores the Met’s triumphs and failings, and the people who have shaped it, from curators and artists to museumgoers and security guards. Highlighting inequalities of wealth, race, and gender, he exposes the hidden costs of the museum’s reliance on “robber barons” and oligarchs, the exclusionary immigration policies that influenced the foundation of the American Wing, and the obstacles faced by women curators. Drawing on extensive interviews with past and current staff, Conlin brings the story up to the present, including the museum’s troubled 150th anniversary in 2020. As the Met faces continued controversy, this book offers a timely account of the people behind an iconic institution and a compelling case for the museum’s vision of shared human creativity.

Margaret Laster, co-editor of New York: Art and Cultural Capital of the Gilded Age and Tastemakers, Collectors, and Patrons: Collecting American Art in the Long Nineteenth Century, joins in conversation.

The Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America
February 10, 2025

In Sons of Wichita, Daniel Schulman delivered a bestselling history of “America’s most powerful and private dynasty,” the Koch family. Now the Mother Jones reporter is back with another formidable group portrait, spotlighting the Lehmans, Warburgs,  Schiffs, Loebs, Seligmans, Gold­mans, and Sachs, and other giants of German Jewish wealth and philanthropy who transformed Wall Street and modern America.

The Money Kings explores how those immigrants built their vast for­tunes in a world that fun­da­men­tal­ly dis­trust­ed Jews. The would both clash and collaborate with J. P. Morgan, E. H. Harriman, Jay Gould, and other famed tycoons. And their firms helped make the United States a financial superpower, underwriting quintessential companies like General Motors, Macy’s, and Sears. Schulman weaves their interconnected origins, chronicles their paths to dominance, and explores how they navigated the fierce prejudices of the upper class, from the Civil War to the rise of Zionism.”Full of illuminating information,” the book shares the unfamiliar story of “these men, their families, and their impact on modern corporate finance, IPOs, anti-trust legislation, the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, philanthropy, Jewish life in the United States, Zionism, and antisemitic conspiracy theories” (Glenn Altschuler) and “doesn’t shy away from the unsavory, rendering his subjects with satisfying complexity” (The New Yorker).

David Huyssen, the author of Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890-1920 and the forthcoming biography of Alfred Winslow Jones, “The Socialist Who Created the Hedge Fund,” joins in conversation.

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Forgotten Approaches to the Housing Crisis
December 9, 2024

As New York City struggles with an acute shortage of affordable housing, we should remember that New Yorkers once built cooperative housing for people with low and moderate incomes on a massive scale. Central to this effort was the United Housing Foundation, an offshoot of the city’s labor movement that built large cooperative apartment complexes such as Penn South in Manhattan, Rochdale Village in Queens and Co-op City in the Bronx.

The United Housing Foundation is gone and its cooperatives have changed, but they remain islands of affordable housing in an increasingly expensive city. What can we learn from this history as we confront New York’s housing crisis?

Margy Brown, executive director of the Urban Homesteading Assistance Program and previously the Associate Commissioner of Housing Opportunity and Program Services at the New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Peter Eisenstadt, author of Rochdale Village: Robert Moses, 6,000 Families, and New York City's Great Experiment in Integrated Housing, is finishing a book on Jackie Robinson and the meaning of integration.

Glyn Robbins, senior lecturer at London Metropolitan University and Fulbright scholar at Rutgers University-Newark, is working on a biography of Abraham Kazan, founder of the United Housing Foundation.

Robert Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian, is professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University-Newark and author of When the City Stopped: Stories from New York's Essential Workers

World War II, New York City, and the Birth of American Fashion
November 19, 2024

Calvin Klein. Ralph Lauren. Donna Karan. Halston. Marc Jacobs. Tom Ford. Michael Kors. Tory Burch. Today, American designers are some of the biggest names in fashion. Yet before World War II, they mostly worked anonymously. The industry, centered on Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue, had always looked overseas for inspiration — because style, everyone knew, came from Paris.

But when the Nazis invaded France in 1940, Paris was suddenly cut off from the rest of the world. The enormous consequence for US fashion have, until now, remained almost unknown. Designers, retailers, editors, and photographers in New York seized the moment, turning out clothes that were sophisticated, modern, comfortable, and affordable. By the end of the war, "the American Look" had been firmly established as a fresh, easy elegance that combined function with style. But none of it would have happened without the influence and ingenuity of a small group of women who have been largely lost to history.

In Empresses of Seventh Avenue, fashion historian and journalist Nancy MacDonell tells the story of how these extraordinary women put American fashion on the world stage and created the template for modern style — and how the nearly $500 billion American fashion industry, the largest in the world, could not have accrued its power and wealth without their farsightedness and determination.

Lilly Tuttle, curator of the Museum of the City of New York’s forthcoming exhibition on the history of fashion in NYC, joins in conversation.

How the First Generation of Emancipated New Yorkers Brought Down Slavery in the US
October 29, 2024

In her new book, The Rising Generation, Sarah Gronningsater uses the first generation of New Yorkers liberated from slavery to relay the history of emancipation. Born into a precarious state after the Revolution this remarkable group of men and women played an enormous role in the struggle that ultimately brought on the Civil War. And through exhaustive research in New York, which had the largest number of slaves in the North, Gronningsater provides their story in full. In the late 1700s, children born to enslaved mothers lived in a quasi-free state. Technically free, they were nonetheless required to labor as indentured servants until they reached adulthood. Parents, teachers, and mentors of these “children of gradual abolition” found multiple ways to protect and nurture them, establishing schools, forming alliances with lawyers and abolitionists, petitioning local and state officials, and guarding against kidnapping. Gronningsater shows how, as the children of gradual abolition reached adulthood, they took the lessons of their youth into campaigns for legal equality, political inclusion, equitable education, and the expansion of freedom across the United States. The acclaimed historian Leslie Harris writes: “This beautifully written, passionately argued book recovers moving examples of black people’s everyday activism that led to profound change and left impressive legacies not only in New York but throughout the nation. An inspiring, necessary book."

Kellie Carter Jackson, chair of the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley College and the author of the award-winning Force & Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence, joins in conversation.

Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough
October 9, 2024

Brooklyn has a distinct story to tell in the annals of social justice. Join us as we honor this unique chapter in New York City’s history with a book party for Brooklynites: the Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough (NYU Press). This new work by Prithi Kanakamedala traces the lives of the Black Brooklynites who defined the city’s most populous borough, and their search for equality and opportunity in the nineteenth century. Kanakamedala (Professor of History, Bronx Community College and MALS, CUNY Graduate Center) will read excerpts from the book, followed by a reception. Books will be available for sale at the event.

**THIS IS A LIVE EVENT**

CUNY Graduate Center
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Wed., Oct. 9, 6:30 – 8pm

This event is organized and hosted by the Public Scholarship Practice Space (PS2) and the Center for the Humanities, and co-sponsored by The Gotham Center and the Master’s in Liberal Studies (MALS) program, at the CUNY Graduate Center.

The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York
October 7, 2024

In his new book, Tyler Anbinder (author of Five Points and City of Dreams) dramatically challenges the standard narrative about the Irish who escaped the Great Potato Famine and settled in the United States. Drawing on new data and ten years of research, the award-winning historian shows that the immigrants who made New York their home in the 1840s and ‘50s were able to make huge strides in America, despite formidable odds.

The fungus which destroyed Ireland’s essential food crop in 1845 left roughly a million dead, and sent 1.3 million to America. The nation was utterly transformed by this migration, but nowhere more than New York. By 1855, roughly a third of the adults living in Manhattan were so-called “Famine Irish.” Consigned to low-paying work and subjected to discrimination, until now the popular belief has been that most of these refugees continued to struggle and remained in poverty. Anbinder paints a far different picture. Showcasing individual and collective tales of perseverance and triumph, Plentiful Country flips the story on its head, demonstrating that most of these immigrants achieved remarkable upward mobility; not just the lower middle-class emigrants who could afford to flee, but hundreds of thousands impoverished by the catastrophe. So often cast as “dazed immigrants unprepared and unsuited for life in New York and America,” Anbinder presents them instead, Hasia Diner writes, “as women and men with agency: adept learners who, by both seizing and creating opportunities for themselves, remade their new country.”

Kurt Schlichting, emeritus professor of sociology and anthropology and the author of Waterfront Manhattan, joins in conversation.

Reframing the History of Slavery in New York
September 23, 2024

New York had, by far, the largest enslaved population of any colony or state in the North, and was nearly the last to abolish the institution. But in his new book, Michael J. Douma challenges much of the conventional wisdom about this subject. In a series of chapters hailed for their methodological innovation, Douma uses fresh demographic and economic data to go beyond the few government records and collections of huge landowning families that have supplied most of what is previously known. He argues, in short, that slavery in New York was a great deal “more Dutch” than we realize, arguing that wealthy descendants of the colonial regime dominated the institution across the British era and well into the early American republic. They also succeeded in holding off the growing force of antislavery, Douma says, because — contrary to what is usually said — the institution was generally profitable, did not rely on importation for expansion, and was rooted firmly in commercial agriculture. Described as “brilliantly researched” (Shane White) and “much-needed antidote” (Jaap Jacobs), The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York is sure to spur debate and reshape the historiography for years to come.

Nicole Maskiell, author of Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry, joins in conversation.

Poverty and Wealth on Postwar Long Island
April 22, 2024

We all know the story. After World War II, white families left cities for suburbs, where they created oases of affluence, supposedly free of “urban” problems. In this eye-opening, prize-winning book, Tim Keogh argues there was more to it. Focusing on Long Island, America’s richest postwar suburb, Keogh shows that the problems associated with cities like New York were present from the start. Military contracts subsidized well-paying local jobs building planes or filing paperwork for the Cold War. But a similarly large and diverse cohort of suburbanites remained impoverished. Not covered by New Deal labor law, they mowed the lawns, constructed the houses, scrubbed the kitchen floors, and stocked retail shelves. Likewise, while the GI Bill and other federal mortgage programs helped many buy single-family homes and leave the working class, they also underwrote efforts to cram others into suburban attics, basements, and sheds. In Levittown’s Shadow thus reveals how the government created both poverty and prosperity, fueling the largest engine of postwar middle-class wealth creation, while keeping millions across the nation in suburban poverty. But policymakers ignored these features of suburbia, instead depicting housing segregation as the cause of inequality and dispersing the poor as the solution, even as suburbs began to outpace urban and rural areas in terms of poverty. By shifting the focus to suburbs, Keogh thus forces us to recognize that poverty was never just an urban problem, and to consider whether depicting suburbs as the cure has not doomed generations of reform.

The Witch of New York: The Trials of Polly Bodine and the Cursed Birth of Tabloid Justice
March 25, 2024

Before the sensational cases of Amanda Knox and Casey Anthony — before even Lizzie Borden — there was Polly Bodine, the first American woman put on trial for capital murder in our nation’s debut media circus.

On Christmas night in 1843, neighbors in a serene village on Staten Island discovered the remains of twenty-four-year-old mother Emeline Houseman and her infant daughter Ann Eliza, bludgeoned to death and burned in a fire. When an ambitious district attorney charged Emeline’s sister-in-law with the murders, the new “penny press” exploded. Polly Bodine was a perfect villain for the media. When Bodine assembled a legal dream-team, the debate expanded from the question of her guilt to her character as a “fallen woman,” a separated wife who committed adultery, had several abortions, and drank gin. Between 1844 and 1846, reporting on three separate trials over the “Christmas murders” enthralled the city and nation. Edgar Allen Poe and Walt Whitman covered the story as young newsmen. P. T. Barnum made a circus out of it. James Fenimore Cooper’s last novel was inspired by it.

The Witch of New York is the first narrative history of the dueling trial lawyers, ruthless newsmen, and shameless hucksters who turned the case into America’s formative “tabloid trial.” In this origin story about how the US became addicted to sensationalized criminal trials, Alex Hortis (author of The Mob and the City) vividly reconstructs an epic mystery from old New York and uses it to challenge our system of tabloid justice of today.

Fiorello LaGuardia and the "Birth of Law and Order Liberalism
March 12, 2024

During the New Deal and World War II, Fiorello La Guardia became perhaps the most famous mayor in the history of New York City. But there is a part of his story that is only now being told. Since the establishment of the Police Department in the mid-1800s, leaders of the NYPD had often served as partners to partisan political power. That changed with La Guardia. But his approach to low-level policing anticipated later trends in law enforcement, including "broken windows" and "stop and frisk.” Officers worked to preserve order by controlling vice, including juvenile delinquency, prostitution, gambling, and "disorderly" establishments. But that often brought them into conflict with socially targeted groups, in particular Black New Yorkers. With the Depression and wartime conditions spurring youth crime, stories featuring Black "hoodlums" were emblazoned all over the media, driving expanded patrols in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Blacks called for protection and more equitable resources, but mainly saw more punishment. This set the stage for an uprising, the Harlem riot of 1943.

In this conversation, Emily Brooks and Shannon King discuss their new studies, Gotham’s War within a War and The Politics of Safety, and the question of whether this period should be viewed as the “birth of law and order liberalism.”

America's Babel: The Linguistic History of NYC and the Fight to Protect the World's Endangered Language
February 28, 2024

Half of the languages spoken on Earth (7,000-plus) may disappear this century. And because many have never been recorded, when they’re gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history, New York. In Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York, he follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities, from the streets of Brooklyn and Queens to villages on the other side of the world, to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against the odds. He explores the languages themselves, from rare sounds to sentence-long words to bits of grammar that encode entirely different worldviews.

On the 100th anniversary of the law that closed America’s borders for decades and the 400th anniversary of NYC’s colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about this growing threat and the onslaught of “killer languages” like English and Spanish, while celebrating New York’s profound linguistic diversity and the joy of tuning into this modern Babel.

Nancy Foner, author or editor of twenty books, including From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration, joins in conversation.

Atomic Bill: The Pentagon's Voice at the New York Times in the Early Cold War
December 5, 2023

William L. Laurence was arguably the most prominent science writer in America during the early Cold War. But the Pulitzer-winning New York Times journalist had a secret. Like so many others in media, science, the arts, and culture, he was on the government payroll.

In Atomic Bill, Vincent Kiernan presents the first biography of this highly influential figure. A Harvard Law graduate, in the 1930s Laurence was an up-and-comer at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, a pioneer of “yellow journalism.” But his big break came when he was recruited to write much of the press on the Manhattan Project on the day President Truman incinerated Hiroshima. That crowned him as one of the leading experts on the nuclear bomb during the 1940s and ‘50s. Hailed by most as a skilled translator of science, critics saw him as a propagandist, cashing in on the militarization of science amid the new existential arms race. Laurence used his perch at the Times to reach new heights of fame and fortune in speechmaking, book writing, filmmaking, and radio broadcasting. But his work declined in quality as his relationship to power grew more lucrative, eventually leading to scandal and forced retirement over his connections to Robert Moses and the 1964 World’s Fair. Kiernan, a veteran science reporter and communications scholar (author of Embargoed Science), argues that Laurence “set the trend, common among today's journalists… to prioritize gee-whiz coverage” at the expense of critical reporting on science and technology.

The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime
November 16, 2023

In this new biography, Nicholas L. Syrett tells the story of one of the most infamous abortionists of the nineteenth century, a tale with unmistakable parallels to the current war over reproductive rights. “Madame Restell,” the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth control, delivered children, and performed abortions for decades in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. But it was the abortions that made her infamous, “Restellism” becoming a term detractors used to indict her.

Abortion was then largely unregulated in most of the United States, including New York. But a sense of disquiet arose about single women flocking to the city for work and greater sexual freedom, amid changing views of motherhood, with fewer children born to white, married, middle-class women. Restell came to stand for everything threatening the status quo. From 1829 onward, restrictions on abortion began to put her in legal jeopardy. For much of this period she prevailed—until she didn’t. The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime paints an unforgettable picture of the mid-nineteenth-century New York and brings Restell to the attention of a whole new generation of women in the current fight over reproductive choice.

Mary Ziegler, Professor of Law at UC Davis and the author of numerous books on the modern day struggle, joins in conversation.

How the Port Authority Built Metropolitan New York
November 2, 2023

In their new book, Mobilizing the Metropolis, Philip Mark Plotch and Jen Nelles describe how the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — the nation’s first public authority — changed in ways that would make it unrecognizable to its founders. Over the past 100 years, the agency’s mission has evolved from improving rail freight to building motor vehicle crossings, airports, office towers, industrial parks, and even a failing commuter rail line. Often viewed with admiration during its early years, it became a target of criticism as it took control of airfields and marine terminals and constructed large bridges and tunnels. Mayors of New York and Newark argued that it should be broken up, echoing others that deemed it a “super-government” that must be reined in.

Yet despite its travails, the Port Authority overcame hurdles that had frustrated other public and private efforts. It built the world's longest suspension bridge, and took a leading role in creating an organization to reduce traffic delays in the region. How did it achieve these successes? And what lessons does it offer to other cities and regions? In a time when public agencies are often condemned as inefficient and corrupt, its history of struggle — between the public and private sectors, democratic accountability and efficiency, regional and local needs — offers lessons for both governmental officials and social reformers. Plotch and Nelles have produced what Jim Burnley, the former U.S. Secretary of Transportation, calls “both the definitive history of the Port Authority and an impressive critical analysis of its evolution, strengths, and weaknesses over its century-long existence. Highly readable, it contains important lessons about how any public authority should, or should not, be created and operated.”

Times Square: 125 Years of Change
October 19, 2023

What is it about Times Square that has inspired so much attention, despite its many profound changes, for more than a century? In Times Square Remade, Lynne B. Sagalyn masterfully recounts the story of this symbolic space’s hold on the public imagination, twenty years after her widely acclaimed Times Square Roulette. The book chronicles its history, from its early days as the nexus of speculation and competitive theater building to its darkest period as vice central, and the years of aggressive public-private intervention that followed, cleansing West 42nd Street and nearby areas like Hell’s Kitchen of pornography and crime.

Accompanied by nearly 160 images, Times Square Remade is a deftly woven narrative of urban transformation that will appeal as much to the general reader as to urbanists, city planners, architects, urban designers, and policymakers. Kenneth T. Jackson, Editor-in-Chief of The Encyclopedia of New York City, writes, “no other intersection on Earth has been as iconic, famous, and frequented as the crossroads of the world in New York. And no other person has written with such authority and knowledge about the place as Lynne Sagalyn.” Sharon Zukin, author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, adds, “Sagalyn's erudition marches off every page.”

John Mollenkopf, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, joins in conversation.

“Enemies of Liberty? The Loyalists of New York City
October 4, 2023

In his new book, Unfriendly to Liberty, Christopher F. Minty revises our understanding of the American Revolution by exploring the lives of the many New Yorkers who chose to side with the British in the rebellion. Arguing that would-be “loyalists” formed an organized group long before the events at Lexington and Concord, Minty recounts how these men, elite and nonelite, championed an inclusive political economy that advanced the public good and strongly protested Parliament's reorientation of North American colonial policy during the Imperial Crisis (1763-75). But rather than locating the critical divide in this era, he identifies the major political and social turning point as lying in the disputes that emerged from the Seven Years War (1756-63). Those events, he argues, created a united force that made New York a headquarters for loyalism in the colonies all during the years that followed. “With dazzling research, sharp insights, and gripping narrative,” the acclaimed historian Benjamin L. Carp writes, “Unfriendly to Liberty provides a new vantage point on the New York City's streets and broadsheets, assemblies, and taverns. Christopher F. Minty challenges shallow stereotypes about revolutionary politics, finally giving a full picture not just of the New York's raucous revolutionaries but also their vigorous opponents.”

Announcing "NYC Revolutionary Trail"
June 6, 2023

The Gotham Center is proud to announce the launch of NYC Revolutionary Trail, its first multimedia walking tour. This 90-minute jaunt through lower Manhattan details New York City's experience with the American Revolution from 1763 to 1789. Each stop provides audio narration with site information, character profiles, select video, and links to a far bigger library of text and imagery online, for a “choose your own adventure” model of self-guided tourism. Here you’ll learn about some of the period’s most famous characters and events — and many others that are far less known, for a trip that will challenge the knowledge of even the most ardent buff. You'll find several lessons plans for classroom use, too, plus a scavenger hunt and trail guide.

Join us for a conversation with Untapped New York’s Justin Rivers and the Gotham Center's Director Peter-Christian Aigner and Ted Knudsen, discussing the project and its next stage of development. Discover some of the least-known historic sites from this period — like Golden Hill, where “the first blood of the Revolution” was shed (today, a side-street used for garbage) or Wallabout Bay, where most of the rebels died (the skulls of P.O.W.'s covering the beach for many years "like pumpkins in autumn"). You'll hear about some of the largely forgotten characters who defined this era and learn why New York should be considered the “city at the heart of the Revolution," this shift in focus ultimately yielding a far more diverse and complicated story.

“Unbought and Unbossed": Shirley Chisholm's New York
May 1, 2023

Shaking up local and national politics by becoming the first African-American congresswoman and the first black (major party) presidential candidate, Shirley Chisholm left an indelible mark as an "unbought and unbossed" firebrand and a leader in politics. Formed by her early years in Barbados and Brooklyn, her political development and outlook did not follow the standard of the civil rights and feminist establishments. Rather, Anastasia C. Curwood argues in this new biography, she took her own path, making signature contributions as a forerunner of black feminist power—centering black women in a movement that sought to create a broadly democratic force through multicultural, multigenerational, and cross-gender coalition-building. Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics presents a “comprehensive political biography” that moves beyond symbolism, weaving Chisholm's public image with her private experiences to create “a definitive account of a consequential life.”

Brian Purnell, author of Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: the Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn, joins in conversation.

Morgenthau: Four Generations of a New York City Dynasty
April 20, 2023

After coming from Germany in 1866, the Morgenthaus established a powerful dynasty in the United States. With unprecedented, exclusive access to family archives, award-winning journalist and biographer Andrew Meier vividly chronicles how they amassed a fortune in Manhattan realty, advised presidents, advanced the New Deal, exposed the Armenian genocide, rescued victims of the Holocaust, waged war in the Mediterranean and Pacific, and, using their foundation of private wealth, became a multi-generational force in local, state, and national government. In the words of former mayor Ed Koch, they were “the closest we’ve got to royalty in New York City.” Hailed as “epic and intimate” (David M. Kennedy), “gripping and illuminating” (Fiona Hill), “a lasting achievement” (Adam Hochschild), and “utterly absorbing” (Gay Talese), Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty captures it all.

Susie J. Pak, author of Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J. P. Morgan, joins in conversation.

The Night Patriots Burned New York City Down
March 30, 2023

New York, the strategic center of the Revolutionary War, was the most important place in North America in 1776. That summer, an unruly rebel army under George Washington repeatedly threatened to burn the city rather than let the British take it. Shortly after the Crown’s forces took New York, much of it burned to the ground. Who set the blaze? In The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution, Benjamin L. Carp delivers the “definitive account of this crucial but forgotten episode” of the war in the first book to fully explore it. Examining why its origins remained a mystery, even after two British investigations, Carp uncovers stories of espionage, terror, chaos, and tragedy in a historical moment we normally associate with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Russell Shorto, prize-winning author of the bestseller Island at the Center of the World and Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom, joins in conversation.

Fishtown, USA: The Rise of Fall of New York's Wholesale Fish Market
March 21, 2023

From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, New York served as the largest fish and seafood center in the US, provisioning much of the nation. The enormous size of the city, and, more importantly, New York’s wholesale and retail network, connected fleets of fishermen catching a wide array of species with countless grocers and restaurants. That industry was concentrated around the iconic Fulton Fish Market, where generations of immigrants labored, introduced the rest of the five boroughs to their culinary traditions, and by the 1920s worked under the shadow of organized crime. In The Fulton Fish Market: A History, Jonathan H. Rees explores the market’s workings and significance from its founding in 1822 to its relocation to the Bronx in 2005, telling the stories of the fishermen, retailers, chefs, and others who depended on the Market, and how it shaped the New York and US diet. Examining transformations at the supply-chain end, it also uses this vital distribution point to argue that wholesalers, innovative businessmen who adapted to a dynamic industry, were ultimately overwhelmed by revolutions in transportation and preservation. The book also explains how changes in the urban landscape and economy affected the Market and its surrounding neighborhood, bringing together economic, technological, urban, culinary, and environmental history to show how Fulton Fish Market shaped American cuisine, commerce, and culture.

Megan J. Elias, author of Food in the United States,1890- 1945 and Lunch: A History, joins in conversation.

The Pirate's Wife: Sarah Kidd and the Golden Age of Piracy in New York City
February 21, 2023

Captain Kidd was one of the most notorious pirates to ever sail the seas. But few know the behind-the-scenes player who enabled his plundering and helped him outpace his enemies. That accomplice was his wife Sarah, a well-to-do woman whose extraordinary life is a lesson in reinvention and resourcefulness. Twice widowed by twenty-one and operating within the strictures of polite society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New York, Sarah secretly aided and abetted her husband, fighting off his accusers alongside him.

Marshaling newly discovered sources from archives in London, New York and Boston, historian and journalist Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos reconstructs her life and places it within the city, a “utopia” for pirates in the Golden Age of Piracy. A compelling tale of love, treasure, motherhood and survival, The Pirate's Wife: The Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd weaves together the personal and the epic in a sweeping historical story of romance and adventure.

Working-Class Utopias: A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City
January 24, 2023

As World War II ended and Americans turned their attention to problems at home, union leaders and other prominent New Yorkers came to believe that cooperative housing would solve the city’s century-old problem of providing decent housing at a reasonable cost for working-class families. In Working-Class Utopias: A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City, Robert Fogelson, one of the nation’s foremost urban historians, tells the story of this ambitious movement from the construction of the Amalgamated Houses after World War I to the building of Co-op City, the world’s largest housing cooperative, four decades later.

Matthew Lasner, co-editor of Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City, joins in conversation.

The "Puerto Rican Problem" in Postwar New York City
November 29, 2022

In this new book of the same title, Edgardo Meléndez presents the first comprehensive study of the “Puerto Rican problem” in postwar New York City—a notion that began with the arrival of migrants from the US colony in 1945 and developed over the next fifteen years into an intense campaign for policies by the government of Puerto Rico (granted commonwealth status in 1952) and New York to ease their settlement into the city and other regions of the United States. The “problem” served as a foundation for academic concepts like the “culture of poverty,” later embedded into the JFK-LBJ administration’s War on Poverty. It also functioned as the inspiration for icons of American popular culture like Arthur Laurents’s West Side Story, which popularized many of the stereotypes of the day, shaping the way Puerto Ricans were studied and understood for generations. Here, Meléndez, a retired professor of CUNY’s Hunter College and the University of Puerto Rico, explores its roots, development, and consequences.

Virginia E. Sánchez Korrol, author of From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City, joins in conversation with the author.

Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism
November 9, 2022

On a Saturday in New York City in 1912, around the wooden tables of a popular Greenwich Village restaurant, a group of women gathered, all of them convinced that they were going to change the world. It was the first meeting of “Heterodoxy,” a secret social club. Joanna Scutts tells the dazzling story of these Greenwich Village feminists who blazed the trail for the movement’s most radical ideas. Heterodoxy’s members were passionate advocates of free love, equal marriage, and easier divorce. They were socialites and socialists; reformers and revolutionaries; artists, writers, and scientists. Their club, at the heart of America’s bohemia, was a springboard for parties, performances, and radical politics. But it was the women’s extraordinary friendships that made their unconventional lives possible, as they supported each other in pushing for a better world. Hotbed is the “never-before-told story” of the bold women whose audacious ideas and unruly acts transformed a feminist agenda into a modern way of life.

Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, joins in conversation with the author.

New York Under Ground: An Archaeological History of the City
October 18, 2022

The history of New York is scattered across the city, in backyards, construction sites, street beds, and parks, from ancient pottery shards and colonial wine jugs to a child’s shoe in Seneca Village, the neighborhood that used to lay in today’s Central Park: everyday objects serving as windows onto forgotten pasts.

In Buried Beneath the City, Nan A. Rothschild, Amanda Sutphin, H. Arthur Bankoff, and Jessica Striebel MacLean tell the story of New York from the perspective of urban archaeology. Exploring the day-to-day world of an ever-evolving metropolis, they explore both the city’s “deep history” and more recent times, from the earliest traces of human life more than 10,000 years ago to Euro-American colonization and New York’s development into an global capital. Touring archeological finds (which still commonly occur), the book examines the details of everyday life unveiled by these artifacts, which have allowed historians to go beyond the written text, to what lay hidden beneath, for a larger, fuller documentary record. The result is a chronicle of a city that has perpetually torn up its foundations and rebuilt itself, lavishly illustrated with objects excavated from every corner of New York—both an introduction to the field, and the best new archaeological profile of Gotham’s rich past.

Diana Wall, author of the award-winning Unearthing Gotham, the Archaeology of New York City (2001), joins in conversation with Nan A. Rothschild and Amanda Sutphin.

Were 18 Languages Spoken in New Amsterdam?
October 11, 2022

It is often said that eighteen languages were spoken in New Amsterdam. In researching his forthcoming linguistic history of greater New York, Ross Perlin, former Robert D.L. Gardiner fellow at CUNY’s Gotham Center, discovered there may have been many more. He suggests a higher count that includes formerly overlooked languages spoken by the Indigenous population and the free and enslaved people brought here from Asia and Africa. He explores how the new port, New Amsterdam, was Native American, African, and European from the beginning, with the template for the city’s extraordinary multilingualism thus set at the very start of Dutch rule.

Join Ross Perlin, Co-Director of Endangered Language Alliance, for this conversation with Peter-Christian Aigner, Director of the Gotham Center for New York City History.

This is a joint event with The New Amsterdam History Center (NAHC). The program is offered free of charge. Your voluntary contribution will help support NAHC projects and programs such as this one (donations here).

Before Central Park
October 5, 2022

With more than 800 sprawling acres in the middle of America’s densest city, Central Park is an urban masterpiece, a living model to countless successors around the world. But before it gained its shape and name, it was home to New Yorkers of many different backgrounds, the site of farms, businesses, churches, burial grounds, and war. In this new book of the same title, Sara Cedar Miller, historian emerita of the Central Park Conservancy, presents an unofficial but definitive account of the land in modern times. From the first Dutch settlers through the crusade to establish America’s first major urban park, Miller chronicles 250 years of history, telling the stories of indigenous hunters, black slaves and white slaveowners, Patriots and Loyalists, the Afro- and Irish-American landowners and pig farmers of Seneca Village, Catholic sisters, Jewish protesters, and more—tales of political chicanery, real estate speculation, cons, and scams, as well as democratic idealism, immigrant striving, and powerfully human lives. Along the way, she unveils a British fortification and camp built during the Revolution, a suburban retreat from yellow fever epidemics constructed at the turn of the last century, and the properties that a group of free black Americans used to secure the right to vote, showing how much of the history of early America is still etched upon Central Park’s landscape today.

Ken Chaya, the NYC artist, designer, and urban naturalist (creator of Central Park Entire: The Definitive Illustrated Map), joins in conversation with the author.

Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York
September 20, 2022

Located on the grounds of the old Freedomland amusement park in the Bronx, Co-op City’s 35 towers and 236 townhouses have been an icon visible to anyone living nearby or travelling in the corridor for generations. In this new book of the same title, Annemarie H. Sammartino tells the story of those who built it and the hundreds of thousands who called it home. Co-op City was erected in 1965, planned as the largest middle-class housing development in the United States, and meant to solve the problem of affordable housing in America's largest city. While it appeared to be a huge success at first, tensions led residents to organize the largest rent strike in US history. Ten years after its construction, a coalition of shareholders took on the state and, against all odds, obtained control. But even this achievement did not halt rising costs and white flight. Nonetheless, the complex weathered the severe recessions and economic declines of the 1970s and 1980s, a monument to postwar liberal ideals, managing a hard-won stability by the end of the century. Freedomland chronicles those early decades, connecting economic and political history with the history of urban planning and race. The result is a fresh perspective on twentieth-century New York.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries, author of a forthcoming study of the Ebbets Field housing complex in Brooklyn, joins in conversation with the author.

Liberty's Chain: The Jay Family, Slavery, and Emancipation
April 18, 2022

The Jays of New York were among the most prominent of Founding Era families. And though John Jay—“central” negotiator of the peace with Britain, first Supreme Court Chief Justice, and co-author of the Federalist Papers—is the best-remembered of the clan, his descendants continued to shape the American republic into the late nineteenth century. In this new multi-generational biography, the historian David N. Gellman shows how the family also embodied the contradictions of the age on the preeminent question of slavery. John Jay served as the inaugural president of New York’s pioneering antislavery society, and his son and grandson embraced radical abolitionism. Neither the scorn of elite peers nor racist mobs deterred their commitment to end the slave power in the South and to combat injustice in the North. But John Jay's personal dealings with African Americans ranged from caring to callousness. And across the generations, even as prominent Jays decried human servitude, enslaved and formerly enslaved people served in their households, living difficult, often isolated, lives that tested their courage and the family's principles. In Liberty’s Chain, Gellman, author of Emancipating New York and coeditor of Jim Crow New York, explores the tension between the personal and the political in this elite family from the colonial and revolutionary eras to the Civil War and beyond, a remarkable story that demonstrates the elusiveness and the vitality of liberty's legacy and speaks directly to our own divided times. 

David Waldstreicher, author of Slavery's Constitution and Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution, joins in conversation.

How the British Lost America: NYC and the Years of Military Occupation
April 4, 2022

John Adams famously claimed the War for Independence “was not part of the [American] revolution,” but “only an effect and consequence of it.” Donald F. Johnson challenges this prevailing view in his prize-winning new book, Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution, the first broad examination of the subject. Building on scholarship that has reframed the struggle as a civil war, Johnson argues that policies and decisions made by the military during the British occupation of various cities alienated colonial supporters of the crown and those who remained neutral (together, a majority of the public), decisively shaping the war’s outcome. In effect, the British lost their authority over the colonies not with the Declaration of Independence or the Continental Army’s victory at Yorktown, but gradually, after losing the hearts and minds of its own base, through its own, highly contingent administration.

No city suffered more or was more important to British victory than New York, its military headquarters during the war and the seat of its Loyalist base. At first, many residents and refugees — especially women and the enslaved, but also free men, rich and poor — saw the occupation as a chance to reinvent their lives. But as the months turned into seven long desperate years, the military dictatorship, and the harsh material circumstances it produced, forced colonials to grapple with their allegiances in very personal ways. Even the most loyal subjects to embrace illicit means just to feed and shelter themselves. They increasingly developed rebel ties for the same reasons. By the war's end, few Loyalists even saw the restoration of British rule as a viable option.

Brett Palfreyman, a Robert D.L. Gardiner fellow at the Gotham Center writing the first major book on the 400,000 Loyalists who remained after the war, joins in conversation.

After the Fiscal Crisis: NYC and the Path to Neoliberalism
March 17, 2022

By the end of World War II, New York City had established itself as the “capital of the world,” the financial and manufacturing headquarters of a nation taking home a staggering 50 percent of global GDP. Just twenty years later, however, newspaper headlines declared that Gotham was in trouble. The press depicted a metropolis overcome by poverty and crime, unmanageable bureaucracy and ballooning deficits. Middle-class residents had fled to nearby suburbs, and more than a million poor black sharecroppers, Puerto Ricans, and others had moved into the boroughs, while many factories had left for the low-wage South. By the mid-1970s, New York faced bankruptcy—like many deindustrializing northern cities. But as the birthplace of the New Deal and the leading postwar “island of social democracy,” it became the preeminent symbol of liberalism run amok in bipartisan national debates over the roots of the “urban crisis” and the proper response to “stagflation” and the new era of low growth, international competition, and globalized production.

In The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism, Benjamin Holtzman reexamines this transformative period and locates the collapsing faith in government and the shift to “market-based solutions” not in the growing power of business and conservatism at the national level, emphasized in most accounts, but in the efforts of liberals in northern Democratic cities to preserve public services. Block associations, non-profits, and professional organizations championed an ethos of volunteerism to save New York’s streets, parks, and housing from neglect, and then came to embrace partnerships with the private sector as the answer to the city’s problems, viewing such alliances not as stopgap measures but as legitimate and ultimately permanent features of modern urban governance. The new system would exacerbate old inequalities and produce new ones in metropolitan regions across the US, but the outsourcing of government responsibilities to business and non-profits was driven less by the assault of pro-market ideologues, Holtzman argues, than by ordinary New Yorkers experimenting with novel ways to maintain robust public services in the face of the city's budget woes. “Neoliberalism” was built from the ground up.

John Krinsky, co-author of Who Cleans the Parks? Public Work and Urban Governance in New York City, joins in conversation.

The Liberal Party, and the Rise and Fall of Social Democracy in NYC
March 1, 2022

Although the US has often been referred to as the “graveyard for third parties” because of its unique electoral system, third parties have played a major role in US history; introducing and elevating such issues as the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, direct elections, the income tax, shorter working hours, child labor regulation, farm aid, unemployment insurance, and more. In the past few decades, they have made a return to American political life, too, with support for a national third party reaching its highest level in recent polls, a solid majority.

In this new book, Left in the Center: The Liberal Party of New York and the Rise and Fall of American Social Democracy, Daniel Soyer examines perhaps the most successful third party of the last century, New York City’s Liberal Party, which for decades after World War II served as kingmaker in the Empire State, helping elect not just mayors and governors, but senators and presidents, too. Established as a platform for anti-Communist social democrats in the mid-1940s, when talk of a national labor party was still in the air, it was essential to the success of Democratic reformers as well as liberal Republicans. But although it became a model for influential third parties on both the right (e.g., Conservatives) and the left (e.g., Working Families), it eventually devolved into what some viewed as a cynical patronage machine, even contributing to the mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani. Soyer, a Professor of History at Fordham University, provides a long-overdue and thorough account of its complicated legacy in this authoritative new work.

Micah Sifry, author of Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America, joins in conversation.

The Great Disappearing Act: The Germans of NYC
February 15, 2022

Where did all the Germans go?

By the early 1900s, New York City had one of the largest German-speaking populations in the world, and the largest in the United States. It became increasingly diverse economically and dispersed geographically, as second- and third-generation descendants from the 1840s-50s wave began moving out of the Lower East Side, America’s first Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), moving uptown to Yorkville, and into Ridgewood, Glendale, and other neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. It was already in transition culturally when the anti-German campaign of World War I erupted.

In her new book, The Great Disappearing Act: Germans in New York City, 1880-1930, Christina Ziegler-McPherson takes a close look at the community before its ultimate assimilation, arguing that when confronted with the “One Hundred Percent Americanism” of the Great War, German Americans sought to make themselves invisible while still existing as a community. The book sheds new light on one of the largest urban ethnic concentrations in the US, one which has often been overlooked. A museum curator, visiting researcher at the Deutsches Schifffahrtsmuseum in Bremerhaven, Germany, and PhD, Ziegler-McPherson is the author of Selling America: Immigration Promotion and the Settlement of the American Continent, 1607-1914.

Ilona Stölken, a freelance journalist and scholar of 19th and 20th c. German and European cultural history, joins in conversation.

A History of Slavery and Resistance in New Amsterdam
November 22, 2021

In her new book, Spaces of Enslavement, Andrea C. Mosterman addresses the persistent myth that the Dutch were more humane slaveowners. Investigating practices in New Netherland and the founding colony that became New York, the historian of the early US and Atlantic world shows that slavery in the old city held much in common with the southern plantation. Detailing how the movement of enslaved persons was controlled in both homes and public spaces like workshops, courts, and churches, the work also explores how the enslaved responded by escaping from or modifying those spaces. Stretching across the 17th and 18th centuries, Mosterman interrogates how the region's Dutch communities engaged in a daily struggle with Black New Yorkers who consistently found ways to resist oppression and claim spaces of freedom.

Nicole Maskiell, the author of a forthcoming book examining the social and kinship networks intertwining enslavers and the enslaved in the development of elite northern culture, joins in conversation.

Patriotism and Profit: Washington, Hamilton, Schuyler & the Rivalry for America's Capital City
November 4, 2021

Contrary to popular understanding, Susan Nagel argues In this invigorating new book, Thomas Jefferson was not even a minor player at the dinner table bargain known as The Compromise of 1790. The real protagonists were America’s new president George Washington and New York’s Senator Philip Schuyler, who engaged in a battle that would uniquely separate the nation’s financial from its political capital. Nagel, the author of Marie-Therese, Child of Terror as well as a critically study of Jean Giraudoux, vividly depicts the City in the days when it served as the first seat of government. Nagel captures the spirit, speech, and sensibility of the era in full and entertaining form, introducing readers to New York’s eighteenth-century movers and shakers, as colorful and fascinating as their counterpart power-brokers today. Delicious political intrigue and scandalous gossip between the three competing alpha personalities—Washington, Schuyler, and the irrepressible Alexander Hamilton—make this a powerful, resonant story, reminding us that our Founding Fathers were brilliant but often flawed human beings.

Alexis Coe, author of the bestseller You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George of Washington, joins in conversation.

A Traitor to His Species: Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement
October 25, 2021

In the Gilded Age city, people and animals lived cheek-by-jowl in environments that were dirty and dangerous to both. Industrialization brought suffering, but also inspired a new compassion that gave birth to the early animal rights movement. At the center of these highly controversial debates stood Henry Bergh, the New Yorker who launched a shocking campaign to stop animal cruelty. In this new biography, the award-winning historian and distinguished professor at the University of Tennessee Ernest Freeberg provides a revelatory social history of the man who founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). Awash in colorful characters, A Traitor to His Species recounts the activist’s battles with robber barons, Five Points gangs, and legendary impresario P.T. Barnum, as as Bergh, cheered on by thousands of men and women in this new cause, pushed for laws to protect trolley horses, livestock, stray dogs, and other animals. 

Janet Davis, Professor of American Studies at University of Texas at Austin and author of The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America, joins in conversation.

New York City in Comics
October 19, 2021

Come join our friends at Untapped New York for this free introduction to a new GothamEd course, New York City and Comics: Examining the 'Special Relationship'.

When you think of comics, you probably think of New York, too. And that’s no accident. The city has often been the setting for writers and stories in this genre, in part because it was for so many decades a central node for segments of the industry. In this Insiders event, you’ll learn more about this history, in conversation with Martin Lund, an historian at Malmö University in Sweden, whose research explores the representation of New York City in comics and the ‘special relationship’ between NYC and comics, so often suggested in fandom, pop culture, and scholarship. Conversation will be led by Peter-Christian Aigner, Director of The Gotham Center for New York City History, and Untapped New York’s Chief Experience Officer Justin Rivers.

New York and the International Sound of Latin Music
October 14, 2021

New York has long been a nexus of the transnational Latin music scene. Nowhere else do so many players from throughout the Caribbean come together to perform. In this new study of the years between the start of WWII and the end of the century, Benjamin Lapidus gathers all the musicians in the city under one mighty sound, including many who have gone unnoticed. While interrogating the forces of segregation and discrimination, the Grammy-nominated musician and John Jay College professor finds that music was often a unifying social force. And by focusing on those who bridged the gap between cultural and musical backgrounds, Lapidus spotlights the impact of all the ethnic groups who changed song and composition in New York, and well beyond. 

Jairo Moreno, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, joins in conversation.

Ellis Island: A People's History
September 28, 2021

In her new book, Malgorzata Szejnert, arguably Poland’s greatest living writer, provides a dramatic, multi-vocal account of the agonies and ecstasies that played out in the walls of Ellis Island. This is a history of those who came, and those turned away, weaving together the personal experiences of the forgotten and remembered, as well the doctors, nurses, commissioners, interpreters, social workers, and chaperones who controlled the fates of the émigrés—often basing their decisions on pseudo-scientific ideas about race, gender, and disability. Brought to life by a master storyteller, it is a compelling new social history of an iconic place that reshaped the United States, focused on allowing the people to speak for themselves.

Sean Gasper Bye, a translator of Polish, French, and Russian literature and winner of the 2016 Asymptote Close Approximations Prize, joins in discussion.

This event was presented in collaboration with The Polish Cultural Institute New York.

Exploring NYC History with The Gotham Center
September 22, 2021

We're excited to announce our new partnership with Untapped New York with this introduction to GothamEd!

Explore the five boroughs from the comfort and safety of your own home in this virtual talk on GothamEd, the new online adult education series from the Gotham Center. The conversation will be led by Justin Rivers, Untapped New York’s Chief Experience Officer and will feature the Gotham Center’s director Peter-Christian Aigner, along with brief talks by some of the program’s fall instructors: Russell Shorto, author of the bestselling history of New Amsterdam, the original Dutch colony, Island at the Center of the World; and Susan Goodier, author of No Votes for Women and Women Will Vote, now working on a book entitled, "Networks of Activism: Black Women in the New York Suffrage Movement.”

Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through its Place-Names
May 13, 2021

In place-names lie stories. That’s the truth that animates Names of New York, a fascinating journey through the names of the city’s streets and parks, boroughs and bridges, playgrounds, and neighborhoods. Exploring the power of naming to shape experience and our sense of place, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro traces the ways in which native Lenape, Dutch settlers, British invaders, and successive waves of immigrants have left their marks on the city’s map. He excavates the roots of many names, from Brooklyn to Harlem, that has gained iconic meaning worldwide. He meets the last living speakers of Lenape, visits the harbor’s forgotten islands, and lingers on street corners named for ballplayers and saints. As recent arrivals continue to find new ways to make New York’s neighborhoods their own, the names that stick to the city’s streets function not only as portals to explore the past but also as a means to reimagine what is possible now.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose books include Island People: The Caribbean and the World and (with Rebecca Solnit) Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, his work also appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Harper’s Magazine, among many other publications. He is a Scholar in Residence at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, where he teaches.

Discussants: Ross Perlin is Co-Director of the Endangered Language Alliance, and the 2021-22 Robert D.L. Gardiner Fellow at the Gotham Center, completing the first major linguistic history of New York City. Garnette Cadogan is the 2020-2021 Harry W. Porter, Jr. Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where he is also a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine
April 27, 2021

In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell ― the first woman in America to receive an MD — founded the first hospital staffed entirely by women, in New York City, together with her sister Emily. Both were tenacious and visionary, but their convictions did not always align with the emergence of women’s rights―or with each other. In this new dual biography, Janice P. Nimura finally gives them both their due. Megan Marshall, the Pulitzer-winning historian, raves: The Doctors Blackwell “should be required reading in all medical schools, indeed for anyone who has ever consulted a doctor.  This rousing story… is also a history of American medicine — how it was practiced and by whom.”

Deirdre Cooper Owens, Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the award-winning author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and Origins of American Gynecology, joins in conversation.

The Last Slave Ships: NYC and the Illegal Years of the Atlantic Trade
April 8, 2021

In The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage, John Harris looks at how the City became one of the last major hubs for the illegal transatlantic slave trade, in the 1850s and ‘60s. Long after the oceanic business was outlawed by every major slave-trading nation, merchants were sending hundreds of ships from American ports to the African coast. The key instigators were traders who moved to New York City after the shuttering of the massive trade in Brazil. These traffickers were determined to make lower Manhattan a key hub in the illegal trade with Cuba. Collaborating with allies in Africa and Cuba, they ensnared around two hundred thousand men, women, and children. Harris explores how the U.S. government went from ignoring, and even abetting, this illegal trade to helping to shut it down completely in 1867.

Gunja Sengupta, author of From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840-1918, joins for this conversation.

James Beard, NYC, and the Closeted Life of the Dean of American Cuisine
March 23, 2021

Eating has become one of New York City’s central social experiences. But it was not so long ago that the very idea of ‘American cuisine’ raised eyebrows and summoned chuckles. That changed dramatically because of chefs like James Beard, the "Dean of American Cookery." In this new portrait from John Birdsall, we learn far more about the private life of the adopted New Yorker, who helped make the City an international restaurant capital. The Man Who Ate Too Much provides an illuminating history of American food in the twentieth century, profiling this “larger than life” host of one of the first television cooking shows, who flouted the rules of publishing with recipes and stories that laid the groundwork for how we cook and eat today. The book also explores the “semi-secret queer life of America’s most celebrated cook,” who remained closeted until late in his career because discovery meant professional ruin and very likely jail, not to mention upsetting the gender politics of the kitchen.

Annie Hauck, former President of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, co-editor of Gastropolis: Food and New York City and author of My Little Town: A Brooklyn Girl's Food Voice, joins for this conversation.

New Yawk Tawk: How the Local Vernacular Became American English, and Then Didn't
March 8, 2021

Usually, popular speech in a nation’s cultural and economic headquarters becomes the defining vernacular for the rest of the country. But not in the US. In her new book, You Talkin’ to Me?, linguist E.J. White attempts to explain why, recovering that period in American history when “cultivated American speech had a New York sound” — dominating stage, radio, and film, heard regularly in the President’s fireside chats, even taught by vocal coaches, until… it didn’t. During the late 19th and early 20th century, the largely Jewish and immigrant bards of Tin Pan Alley, writers of the Algonquin roundtable, early Hollywood, and other powerfully influential quarters of elite culture taught Americans how to speak. But after the nation sealed its borders, the Ivy League and other universities began limiting the growing influx of New Yorkers, the city’s own schools moved to rid children of their parents’ accents, filmmakers turned “New Yawk tawk” into something comical, and broadcasters like Edward Murrow replaced the City’s English with Midwestern speech as the “standard” US accent. New York has continued to be a “great factory of language” thanks to massive cultural infusions like hip hop. But as White argues in this rollicking phonetic history— full of interesting trivia, “unburdened by nostalgia, and… never obscured by a scrim of schmaltz” (Wall Street Journal) — America has become distinct for its unofficial capital’s lack of influence over the national language.

Michael Newman, author of New York City English and co-PI of CUNY’s Corpus of New York City English Project, serves as discussant.

New York 2021: Crisis as History
February 16, 2021

Conditions worldwide form a triple crisis of unprecedented scope and fury: a crisis of economy, public health, and the natural environment. Devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic and an outward migration of residents and work, cities face extraordinary risks. While pundits ask polemically if the city is “dead,” serious scholars ponder the future of urban agglomerations. New York, the largest U.S. urban center, occupies the eye of the American storm. Between the inauguration of the Biden administration and citywide elections in November, New Yorkers must confront the existential challenges of the urban condition with practical discussions: What scope for action does this city really have? Which precedents, from the New Deal to the 2008 financial crisis, can it draw upon to solve economic, health, and ecological problems? How can the city’s social and cultural communities move new ideas forward without losing ground to special interests and power brokers who represent the past?

Panelists:

Kim Phillips-Fein, Professor of History, New York University; author, Fear City: New York's Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics
Destin Jenkins, Assistant Professor of History, University of Chicago; author, The Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City (forthcoming)
Ronnie Lowenstein, Director, Independent Budget Office of the City of New York (2000-Present)
Adam Tooze, Professor of History / Director of European Institute, Columbia University; author, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

Moderator: Sharon Zukin, Professor Emerita of Sociology at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY and of Earth and Environmental Sciences at The Graduate Center, CUNY; author, The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy.

How Tammany Democrats (and Republicans) Pioneered "Honest Graft" in America
February 4, 2021

In the 1930s, Matthew Josephson famously described the Senate of the late 19th and early 20th century as “The Millionaire’s Club,” for its dominant, wealthy members, closely allied to major industries. Congress now boasts a larger percentage of the “superrich” than ever before, and growing fast in the leadership of both parties. But it was George Washington Plunkett, “bard of Tammany Hall” (New York’s Democratic machine), who explained much earlier what had fueled this development at the state and municipal level: “honest graft.”

As early as the 1850s, government itself emerged as a major source of garnering wealth in America, producing some of the nation’s earliest millionaires. Yet we know shockingly little about how the generally middle- and even working-class men who joined the Club via Tammany-style “public service” acquired their millions. In Electoral Capitalism: The Party System In New York's Gilded Age, political scientist Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer takes a fresh look at the city and state in the late 1800s, arguing that Democrat and Republican officeholders pioneered the ways of using modern government to get rich—not only by making legal, if corrupt, deals with leaders of national trade, finance, and industry, but promising benefits that mobilized working-class voters, a dualism that effectively help stitch together, or “nationalize,” the American “party system.”

Thomas Ferguson, Director of Research at the Institute for New Economic Thinking and Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, best known for his “investment theory of party competition,” joins in conversation.