“Serving Canada in His Majesties Armies”: A Staten Islander in the Canadian Expeditionary Force
By Phillip Pappas
Across the United States, immigrant communities voiced their opinions about the wartime activities of the European nations and the American government’s policy towards the conflict. In the five boroughs of New York City, where three-fourths of the nearly 5 million residents were immigrants and their children, ethnic groups held rallies, parades, and demonstrations, sponsored public lectures, raised funds, and used the press to respond to the declarations of war in Europe and to promote the plight of their homelands. Many New Yorkers sought opportunities to join the fight in Europe. Some were resident aliens who were registered reservists in the militaries of their respective homelands, while others were U. S. citizens with cultural ties and ideological sympathies to the combatants.
The World of Dubrow's Cafeteria: An Interview with Marcia Bricker Halperin
By Robert W. Snyder
In the middle decades of the twentieth century in New York City, Dubrow’s cafeterias in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and the garment district of Manhattan were places to get out of your apartment, have coffee with friends, or enjoy a hearty but affordable meal. They were grounded in the world of Jewish immigrants and their children, and they thrived in years when Flatbush and the Garment District each had a distinctly Jewish character. […] before Dubrow’s cafeterias were shuttered, Marcia Bricker Halperin captured their mood and their patrons in black and white photographs. These pictures, along with essays by the playwright Donald Margulies and the historian Deborah Dash Moore, constitute Marcia’s book Kibitz and Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria, published by Cornell University Press and winner of a National Jewish Book Council prize for Food Writing and Cookbooks.
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.
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.
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.
Placemaker and Displacer: How Transit Shaped New York
By Polly Desjarlais
Before 1950, a vibrant multi-ethnic, residential neighborhood known as Little Syria existed at the very bottom of Manhattan. A concentration of immigrants from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine (countries collectively known then as Greater Syria) settled on Lower Washington Street beginning in the 1880s… As in the case of Chinatown, the transit connections between Little Syria and Brooklyn became instrumental in the community’s transplantation and survival… nearly the whole neighborhood was razed in the 1940s to make way for the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (Hugh L. Carey Tunnel). . . In the case of Little Syria, the city’s transportation demands both displaced people and provided a means of resettlement in other parts of the city.
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.
Haitian Refugees, ACT UP New York, and the Transnational Dimensions of Local Organizing for AIDS Housing
By Maggie Schreiner
…as small numbers of people started being released from Guantánamo under interim orders; the lawyers didn’t know how to arrange for supportive housing. A group in New Jersey had housed the first few people who had been freed, but as a plane carrying an HIV-positive Haitian child and his grandmother approached Newark Airport, the organization backed out of the arrangement. Unless alternate housing could be found immediately, the two would be returned to Guantánamo…
The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn: An American Story
Reviewed by Jon Butler
Between the Civil War and 1900, "old" Brooklyn both prospered and declined. Real estate developers and the new Brooklyn Bridge swelled Brooklyn's tony neighborhoods with middling and upper-class commuters to Manhattan….The New York Times may have been condescending when it labelled Brooklyn "that moral suburb" before the Brooklyn Bridge dedication, as Blumin and Altschuler put it. But it hadn't missed the Protestants' aim.
The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots that Shook New York City
Reviewed by Aaron Welt
With The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902, Scott D. Seligman offers the first book-length treatment of the campaign of Jewish housewives against the “Beef Trust.” … Seligman provides a highly readable chronology of the events between May and June of 1902 that, at the time, earned the title of “a modern Jewish Boston Tea Party” and, later, the Kosher Meat Boycott. He succeeds in bringing to life the largely forgotten and primarily female leaders of the consumer campaign, their roles within the collective effort to bring down the price of kosher beef, the internal divisions that developed, and their significance for American Jews.
