Arnold Foster: Walter Lippman: An Intellectual Biography
Interviewed by Rob Snyder
From the years before World War I until the late 1960s, the journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann was one of the most influential writers in the United States of America. His words and ideas had a powerful impact on American liberalism and his writings on the media, particularly on stereotyping and journalistic objectivity, are still taught today. Lippmann is now the subject of Tom Arnold-Forster’s Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography, published by Princeton University Press. Arnold-Forster explores Lippmann in his evolving historical context, from the Progressive Era to the Cold War. He argues that Lippmann was a much more complicated thinker than is usually recognized who went from being a liberal socialist to a conservative liberal.
Operation Sail 1976: How New York City Came Together in a Time of Crisis
By Angelina Lambros
The On July 4, 1976, New York City celebrated the Bicentennial of American independence with a parade of ships that began at the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and moved up the Hudson River. Officially titled “Operation Sail,” more than 200 ships gathered for the event. With more than six million spectators, it became the largest crowd in New York City’s history. For America's largest city where people regularly turned out for special events, Operation Sail proved truly exceptional.
Reel Freedom: Black Film Culture in Early Twentieth Century New York City
Review By Deena Ecker
Reel Freedom challenges the reader to think beyond the Harlem Renaissance and place film, an important piece of leisure in the 1920s and ‘30s, at the center of the Black cultural and intellectual transformation in New York and the nation. While much of the book focuses on the theaters in Harlem, Lopez reminds us that in the first decade of the 20th century, there were pockets of Black life all over the city. The ways that Black moviegoers, critics, projectionists, and producers engaged with film demonstrated a claim to physical, intellectual, and cultural space in early-twentieth-century New York. In real and significant ways, these claims to space were part of the larger Black struggle for equality.
From 1949 until his death in 1997, Murray Kempton was a distinct presence in New York City journalism. Peddling around town on a three-speed bicycle wearing a three-piece suit, he wrote about everything from politics to jazz to the Mafia. His writing was eloquent, his perspective unique, and his moral judgements driven by a profound sympathy for losers, dissenters and underdogs. […] Going Around: Selected Journalism / Murray Kempton (Seven Stories Press, 2025), edited by Andrew Holter, brings Kempton’s work to old admirers and a new generation of readers.
Fluoride in the Water and the Paranoid Style in New York City Politics
By Matthew Vaz
Fluoride has once again emerged as a matter of public controversy since a federal judge, in October of 2024, ordered the EPA to conduct a risk assessment on the effects of fluoride in the water. The issue has been further enlivened by indications that the incoming presidential administration may support ending fluoridation of water. Little remembered is the heated and drawn-out controversy that brought fluoride to the water supply of New York City. Richard Hofstadter, who lived and worked in New York all through the contentious debate, undoubtedly must have had some of his fellow New Yorkers in mind.
Sadly, Judy did not grow older and develop into a more culturally significant and financially stable feminist voice. The goal was original: these women were familiar with the gendered expectations of the many periodicals where they regularly published – from radical magazines like the Masses to the conventional Ladies’ Home Journal. Although there were influential women editors at the time (Harriet Monroe, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, to name a few), no other publication promised to disrupt the status quo in order to present the candid perspective of women. Even if Judy did not have long-term success, the youthful ambition of these women led them to a variety of creative accomplishments and careers in film, radio, the visual arts, journalism, and literature; these media provided other venues for them to privilege the perspective of women.
Reading from Left to Left: Radical Bookstores in NYC, 1930-2000s
By Shannon O’Neill
As pivotal spaces for leftists to strategize and engage one another, political party bookstores were key in supporting the labor movement, pushing for racial equality, working on behalf of revolutionary freedom fighters, and participating in global solidarity and struggle. In doing so, they created the space for their customers to not only radically reimagine their worlds, but to participate in activating their radical imaginations.
These women’s prisons believed there were only three legitimate jobs a woman could have: wife, maid, or nursemaid. For any of those jobs, a woman needed to be properly feminine (in the eyes of white Victorians). Any woman deemed not feminine enough (too masculine, too sexual, too willful, too Black, etc.) would inevitably end up unmarried and out of work, at which point she would become a prostitute. For this reason, reformers spent the late 1800s and the early 1900s developing a system of “women’s justice” that targeted women at younger ages and for smaller offenses, in order to get them into prisons where they would be forcibly feminized. As the annual report of the first women’s prison in America put it in 1875, their job was “to take these [women] and so remold, reconstruct and train them, as to be fitted to occupy the position assigned them by God, viz., wives, mothers, and educators of children” — a sentiment not far off from that expressed in a report on prostitution and the Women’s Court put together for Mayor LaGuardia in 1934, which stated that the best way to reform arrested women was “wholesome marriage and the responsibility for children.”
In Brooklyn Heights, Private Schools Won So Integration Lost
By Rebecca Zimmerman
Public and private schools’ histories have often been told separately. By including private schools in the story of the attempted integration of Brooklyn Heights, we can better understand how they came to take on so much power. Furthermore, private schools are an underexplored actor within this tumultuous moment in New York City’s schools. With the added pressures of the 1964 school boycott and 1968 teacher strike, private schools got a unique boost from parents who gave up on public schooling. Those parents charted a course that continues to this day, with Brooklyn Heights private schools growing in both campus size and enrollment numbers over the second half of the twentieth century. This story also partly explains why New York’s public schools remain among the most segregated today.
By 1929, Black lady lovers were becoming so visible in Harlem that the powerful and popular pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., delivered one of the first known sermons that singled out the harm caused by queer women. The New York Age reported he declared, “homo-sexuality and sex perversion among women” has “grown into one of the most horrible debasing, alarming and damning vices of present day civilization.” Powell “asserted that it is not only prevalent to an unbelievable degree but that it is increasing day by day.” This shows the community pushback that accompanied the increasing awareness of Black women in Harlem who sought relationships with other women.
