A Pathfinder in the Village: Buffy Sainte-Marie on Building a Career in New York’s Folk Music Revival
By Christine Kelly
Even as the Village proved a less inclusive environment than its outward appearance suggested, Buffy Sainte-Marie effectively harnessed the resources available to her as an up-and-coming artist in the heart of the national folk scene in order to craft a stage persona that resisted gender and race-based stereotypes, garner and maintain creative and commercial success, and use her popularity to raise awareness of dire needs among Indigenous communities across North America in an era of racial reckoning and social change. By making the most of her time in New York – an experience marked by the artist’s fascination with the rock and rhythm and blues shows of 1950s Brooklyn as much as the Village performances of the 1960s folk era – cultivating allies among fellow artists, and supporting Indigenous causes, Buffy Sainte-Marie charted a rare path forward as an influential artist and activist whose story paints a complex portrait of New York’s folk revival and the creative influences, cultural locations, and power brokers that shaped it.
Walkers in the City: Jewish Street Photographers of Midcentury New York
Review by Daniel Morris
In an homage to a space and time that have passed, but that remain as traces in the vivid depictions on display in this handsome and informative volume, Moore offers a love letter to photographers who looked past ideological doctrine (worker strikes and political protests are set aside) to teach viewers and to remind themselves how to regard their fellow New Yorkers with the dignity of concerned attentiveness.
Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism
Review By Edgardo Meléndez
For Power, Puerto Rico’s colonial status greatly undermines the honesty of America’s “Good Neighbor” policy towards Latin American countries in the 1930s. She recounts the PRNP’s continued efforts to obtain support for its cause into the 1940s and argues that it was crucial in getting important sectors in several Latin American countries to challenge US policy towards the region.
Excerpt From New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century
By Sabrina Fuchs Abrams
The question remains, why does women’s humor continue to be overlooked and undervalued? And why did these New York women of wit feel the need to mask their social critique through humor? The primary resistance to women’s humor goes back to false assumptions about feminine versus masculine behavior associated with the expression of intellect, aggression, and humor. Women were not supposed to “get” jokes, and they were certainly not expected to tell jokes.
Sarah Smith Tompkins Garnet: A Most Remarkable Suffragist
By Susan Goodier
Black women did not need white women to patronize, direct, organize, or financially support their efforts. They already had quite a few active suffragists, and several prominent leaders, including Sarah Garnet, and at least one organization in the city dedicated to women’s suffrage. In fact, virtually every Black women organization, established for whatever purpose—anti-lynching, racial uplift, integrated education, temperance—also supported women’s suffrage. It is the universality and intersectionality of Black women’s vision of equality and rights for women—as opposed to exclusion and limitation—that differentiates their suffrage activism from that of many white women’s organizations of the period.
Streets in Play: The Playstreets Photography of Katrina Thomas
By Rebekah Burgess and Mariana Mogilevich
Photographs of recreation programs like this one were commissioned to offer visual proof that, after four summers of nation-wide protest and violence, starting in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1964, the city was compensating for a long-term lack of investment in low-income, racially segregated neighborhoods…. A few of Thomas’ images were utilized for official purposes, reproduced in pamphlets to attract or to thank program sponsors, but her exceptional eye transcended the municipal task. Her lens recorded the city's sponsored activities as well as the more candid action at the edge of the frame. These captivating, impromptu images provide a rare perspective on a distressed urban landscape, privileging a child’s-eye view of the possibilities for play and delight.
Ono’s earliest performances took place in the Chambers Street Loft Series, which featured artists who had met in [John] Cage’s composition class at the New School. For this performance series, Ono conceived the idea of renting the loft of a hundred-year-old Italianate commercial building in Tribeca and paid the $50.50 monthly rent. Ono co-organized the series with the composer La Monte Young. Nonetheless, her works did not appear formally on the series program. And Ono found herself denied credit for her role in organizing and producing the series, which Young claimed as solely his own in the series invitations, programs, and oral history….Ono creatively responded to the challenge of her own noninclusion by staging dramatic guerilla performances.
Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster: The Antebellum South’s Love-Hate Affair with New York City
Review by Emily Holloway
In 1788… a mere 62 bales were shipped to Europe via New York, compared to 153,757 less than thirty years later (2)….Despite the lengthy and arduous journey, tourists, planters, and writers flocked to the city... During their visits, these elite southerners – many of whom owned cotton plantations -- were rubbing elbows with New York’s mercantile and financial leaders,… The close social ties that developed between these classes built on their intimate financial connections through cotton… southern writers remarked critically on the vast economic inequality on display throughout the rapidly growing city, a characteristic they frequently tied to the machinations of industrial capitalism. This critique was frequently deployed as a reaction to northern abolitionist sentiments, a false equivalence between the ravages of industrial “wage slavery” and the racist violence of plantation slavery.
Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry
Review by Emily Holloway
Maskiell argues that both social groups – the enslavers and the enslaved – built, maintained, and challenged their respective terms of community and belonging, whether through diplomacy or corporate mergers disguised as marriage arrangements or by sustaining regional networks of contacts to foment rebellion and resistance. The text at times navigates a vast geographic scale, but successfully keeps the narrative grounded in the roots of elite Dutch society in seventeenth century New Netherlands…The overall book project seeks to illuminate the incremental and cumulative changes along with the continuities linking Dutch colonial practices to English colonial institutions in the transition from New Netherlands to New York.
Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics
Review by Michael Woodsworth
Chisholm entered Congress as a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, a staunch defender of the Great Society, an advocate of expanded welfare benefits, and an unapologetic feminist. Despite her reputation as a “fiery idealist,” Curwood argues, she was also “ruthlessly pragmatic.” Chisholm was a coalition builder: she helped to found the Congressional Black Caucus as well as the National Women’s Political Caucus…. The 1972 presidential primary run remains Chisholm’s signature moment.… Chisholm may have been a transformational figure, but, as Curwood shows, she was also a product of her times. Her rise, accomplishments, and setbacks match, almost too perfectly, the arc of 20th-century American liberalism.
