The Benab: Where Caribbean Culture Took Root in Queens
By Shafrana Carpen
By the mid-1980s, New York City had become a second home for tens of thousands of Caribbean immigrants. Guyanese, Trinidadians, Jamaicans, and others settled in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, bringing their cultures with them. Between 1980 and 1990, immigrants from the Caribbean made up almost a third of new arrivals, yet in those years, there were few places designed for them—no club where a nurse from Georgetown or a roofer from Berbice could truly feel at home. That absence gave rise to The Benab, a nightclub that became far more than a nightlife destination. Located on Jamaica Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, The Benab was one of the first Indo-Caribbean clubs in the borough and a central meeting point for a generation yearning to find a home away from home.
Jailed for Freedom: Afro-Spanish Sailors and Legal Resistance in Eighteenth-Century New York
By Beatriz Carolina Peña
The experiences of Fiallo and De la Torre reveal how Spanish American sailors captured through privateering were reclassified as “prize negroes,” sold, and forced to seek freedom within a legal system structured to uphold slavery. After arriving in New York from London as attorney general in November 1752, Kempe began bringing liberty claims grounded in the Law of Nations before the governor and council. These cases illuminate both the possibilities and the limits of law in a colonial society deeply committed to racialized slavery. Though they came from different Spanish colonies and reached New York about a year apart, their paths converged on July 7, 1753, when both were placed in jail for the protection of their freedom.
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.
New York Sari: An Interview with Curator Salonee Bhaman
Interviewed By Dominique Jean-Louis
Our social, material, and emotional worlds are shaped by history that is often far more complicated and varied than what we’re likely to learn in a classroom. I hope that people come away from this exhibition with a curiosity to learn more about how and why the things they love in this city — be it a beautiful and colorful fabric or a funky groove, or a tasty and transcendent meal — got to where they are and then follow that curiosity to learn more about the people that brought that thing, or food, or color palate into their lives. New York is a city of immigrants. It has been for a very long time. The themes of displacement, segregation, and persecution that often suffuse our stories of migration come to exist alongside a different set of narratives in this place: stories of community forged across differences of culture and experience.
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.
Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar (ed.), Black Movement: African American Urban History Since the Great Migration
Reviewed by Zariyah Grant
Black Movement: African American Urban History since the Great Migration, edited by Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, is an ambitious collection that asks: What has happened to Black urban communities since the end of the Great Migration? Historians have yet to write this history, and Ogbar enlists an impressive array of scholars to begin this bold endeavour. […] Hovering over this inquiry are the paradoxes of the Civil Rights Movement: its victories enabled the ascent of a Black middle class, while the Black poor continued to bear the brunt of the assault on the welfare state.
Contributions Have Poured in from All Classes, from All Sects: New York City and Great Hunger in Ireland
By Harvey Strum
In 1847, New Yorkers of all religious denominations donated first to Irish, and second to Scottish relief efforts as part of a national movement of American philanthropy. It was during this moment that the United States emerged as the leader in voluntary international philanthropy. Commenting on the remarkable ecumenical convergence of relief efforts, New York’s mayor, Philip Hone wrote in his diary, “The Catholic Churches have given nobly, and every denomination of Christians has assisted liberally in the good work: Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and Romanists are all united in the brotherhood of charity.”
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.
