Policing the World from New York City: How Policing Changed from 1880 to 1920
A Collaboration with Public Books: Matthew Guariglia, interviewed by Emily Brooks
From the 1880s to the 1940s, New York City was transformed—and so too was the New York City Police Department. This is the second of two interviews—published in collaboration with Public Books—where Matthew Guariglia and Emily Brooks discuss this pivotal era, through their exciting new books on the NYPD. The first interview was published on Public Books. You can read it here.
Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City
Review By Douglas Flowe
This work is not only timely but reflective of growing scholarship on law enforcement that places New York City front and center; rightfully so considering how influential Gotham is in terms of law enforcement and penology. With resources like the La Guardia papers, court record books, oral histories, and NAACP papers from the Library of Congress, Brooks has crafted a major contribution to the history of the often overlooked mid-twentieth century development of America’s criminal justice system; a story that will be relevant to all students of law, urban history, criminality, and twentieth-century politics.
Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York
Review By Emily Holloway
Set from the original founding of the NYPD in 1845 and concluding around the first World War, Guariglia’s book situates the NYPD as a medium of American imperial ambition and statecraft. Police and the Empire City is not merely a history of the country’s largest and most influential police department; it also positions the NYPD as a repository of scientific knowledge about race, gender, and sexuality that is mobilized and iterated to assert state authority and preserve order.
The Pirate’s Wife: the Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd
Review by Kevin McDonald
…[S]he has produced a lively and entertaining biography of Sarah Kidd, from her arrival to the city through her multiple marriages and business dealings, with the book’s main focus on her relationship with William and the aftermath of his notorious demise. The narrative hits full sail when the privateer-turned-pirate returns from the Indian Ocean and Sarah becomes his accomplice in crime. Overall, the book is a stirring and fast paced yarn that helps reveal another layer of the Kidd saga, and more broadly suggests that the old axiom, “behind every great man is a great woman,” might be true even when dealing with pirates.
Morganthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of An American Dynasty by Andrew Meier
Reviewed by David Huyssen
Henry wasn’t grateful. He hired Pinkerton agents to keep Lazarus away from his wedding. A talented, volcanically ambitious middle son, Henry had been nursing an Oedipal grudge for years. Lazarus had forced him to drop out of City College at fourteen to go to work, and the sting of this betrayal overshadowed the fact that it had also prompted a vital step on Henry’s journey to riches and repute: a job in a law firm run by one of Lazarus’s acquaintances, who initiated him into the world of property management.
Henry rejected his father but embraced his methods.
“Mortars over Stapleton Heights”: Audre Lorde on Staten Island
By David Allen
In the poem, “On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge,” Lorde contemplates leaving Staten Island where she had lived for nearly thirteen years. Her connections to the place were complex, bringing together her love of nature, her need for a place to write and work, to be with her lover and her children, as well as with other poets and activists. All these had come to pass within a social and political climate inscribed with racism, homophobia, and violence.
Review: Hugh Ryan’s The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison
Reviewed by Rachel Corbman
Fifty years ago, an art deco prison towered over Greenwich Village. Between the years of 1929 and 1971, tens of thousands of women and trans masculine people passed through the Women’s House of Detention, waiting for a trial or serving sentences. In The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, Hugh Ryan convincingly demonstrates why this largely forgotten prison matters to queer history. Despite Ryan’s central focus on the so-called House of D, The Women’s House of Detention does not read like an institutional history. Rather, Ryan weaves together the life histories of dozens of women and transmasculine people, following them before and after their time at the House of D.
Review: Terry Williams, The Soft City: Sex for Business and Pleasure in New York City
Reviewed by Timothy J. Gilfoyle
Public sex in New York evolved amidst wide-ranging social and economic change in Gotham from 1979 to 2018. The “Disneyfication” of Times Square and the elimination of the most visible forms of public pornography attracted the most attention and commentary. But an evolving sexual revolution of sorts simultaneously occurred throughout the city. For four decades, the sociologist and ethnographer Terry Williams was watching closely, taking notes. Literally.
Anti-Asian Violence and Acts of Community Care from the 1980s to the Present
Vivian Truong Interviewed by Hongdeng Gao
Today on the Blog, Gotham’s editor Hongdeng Gao speaks with Vivian Truong, author of “From State-Sanctioned Removal to the Right to the City” and a core committee member of the A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project.Truong discusses segregationist and police violence against Asian American, Black and Latinx residents in southern Brooklyn in the 1980s and 1990s and the cross-group, cross-issue movements that developed in response to such violence.
The Complicated Legacy of Paul Moss, La Guardia’s Infamous “Gutter-Cleaner”
By Jonathan Kay
Outside the conference room at the Bow Tie Partners offices in Times Square, there is a framed letter, dated September 5, 1944, addressed to one “Master Charles B. Moss, Jr.” — the grandson of legendary New York City film exhibitor B.S. Moss (1878-1951), who still presides over the family film and real-estate business.
