Unbeknownst to the Dutch colonists, their successors, the English occupiers, the politicians of Tammany Hall, and ultimately the Progressive Reformers, would all adopt variations of this warlike framing on pigs. The details of the various conflagrations with swine of interest, along with the broader impacts and effects of pig-control and pig-eradication policies, had significant and lasting consequences. Ultimately, pigs hold an important place in the history of domesticated animals in urban areas.
From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower: Charles G. Hine’s 1905 Photographic Survey of Broadway
By Nick Yablon
In recent years, historians have turned to photograph albums to show how Americans memorialized love and death, how they visually constructed or challenged racial regimes, or how they engaged an emerging celebrity culture. But albums can also serve as crucial documents of urban history. Reformers’ albums show how tenements, billboards, or street vendors were framed as problems requiring civic action; commemorative albums record how cities staged and remembered their civic anniversaries and public events; construction albums preserve the architectural histories of buildings and bridges; and vacation albums reveal tourist perceptions of urban sights.
Oaths and Interracial Solidarity: New York City’s 1741 Plot
By Kevin Murphy
In early 1741, an investigation into a robbery in Manhattan led to rumors of an interracial plot to destroy the city. Local officials tracked stolen coins and other items to John Hughson, a tavern-keeper known for serving enslaved people. Authorities were already concerned about illicit rendezvouses among slaves, soldiers, and poor whites; their suspicions spiked, however, when a series of unexplained fires started at Fort George and then at various places across the city. Mary Burton, the Hughson’s sixteen-year-old “Irish servant girl,” came forward to implicate her “master” and his customers, painting a vivid picture of impending mayhem.
Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America
Review By Dillon L. Streifeneder
That the English took New Netherland from the Dutch in 1664 is well known. Why the English seized the Dutch colony, along with the circumstances of how they managed to achieve their conquest, however, remain largely forgotten to all but a small number of professional historians and archivists. Russell Shorto’s Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America, in what is surely the most comprehensive and accessible account of the English conquest, is therefore a welcome addition to scholarship on New York’s Dutch period and well-worth the read.
Rural County, Urban Borough is a history with a strong sense of place. Covering the the history of Queens from European settlement to the present, Kroessler charts centuries of change in the landscape. He shows how politics, industry, transportation, government and real estate interests all shaped the borough. Linking Queens to New York City and the wider world, Kroessler illuminates important elements of American metropolitan history.
Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & The Police Killing That Galvanized New York City
Interviewed By Emily Brooks
The Eleanor Bumpurs story is one of those hard histories. Parts of her story include scenes of personal disappointments, economic struggles, maternal loss, and ultimately state violence. As I was writing the book, I continuously told myself that it was my responsibility to tell this complicated story with nuance and compassion and care. Presenting a nuanced perspective on Eleanor’s life and killing created space for me to offer a full biography, to tell broader stories about 1980s New York City, and to shed light on late-twentieth-century Black women’s socioeconomic and political lives. Moreover, telling hard histories presents the opportunity to draw important lessons and insights from the past and place contemporary moments within historical context.
Henry H. Sapoznik: The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City
Interviewed by Rob Snyder
The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City offers a new look at over a century of New York's history of Yiddish popular culture. Henry H. Sapoznik — a Peabody Award-winning coproducer of NPR's Yiddish Radio Project — tells the story in over a baker's dozen chapters on theater, music, architecture, crime, Blacks and Jews, restaurants, real estate, and journalism.
Hopper’s second work depicting the island, Blackwell’s Island (1928), is stark and unsettling, related mostly in title to the 1911 piece. […] The river, a bright cerulean blue, occupies the bottom half of the canvas, and the top half consists of pale blue sky and odd clouds receding into the distance. All of the infamous institutions on the island are there, but by now had almost ceased operating. Hopper paints them as flattened, simplified, and lit brilliantly by the sun. Like most of his works, there is something slightly off about the scene — it is too quiet, too placid. Though the buildings are banal, Hopper suggests that there is something ominous that occurred within their walls.
Pass through any of Central Park's twenty original entrances today (Figure 1), and you're walking through spaces defined more by absence than presence. These "gates" are really just gaps in the perimeter wall, full of intention never realized — invisible stories of artistic talent, social connection, and personal ambition in antebellum New York. Like the carefully framed views created by Central Park’s designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, they offer at its threshold a glimpse into unseen forces that shaped America's first great public space.
Melting Metropolis: An Interview with Daniel Cumming and Kara Murphy Schlichting
Interviewed By Rachel Pitkin
Public archives help create a record that highlights, or at least can suggest, the varied experiences of summer heat, even if one must learn to “read” the images with a critical eye. And while the archive itself is inherently selective — not everyone can or will upload their images of summer, of course — visual records that cross all five boroughs and span multiple generations reveal a rich tapestry of New York City life over many summer seasons.
