The Era Was Lost: The Rise and Fall of New York City’s Rank and File Rebels
Review By Benjamin Serby
Dyer laments that “a politically self-aware working class” no longer exists anywhere in the United States, including New York City. It would seem that until something profoundly shifts in our political culture, workers will simply defend what they already have rather than push for more. With longstanding institutional, legal, and economic arrangements in nothing short of crisis, perhaps this is the moment when the wheel of history — stalled fifty years ago — finally begins to turn once more.
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The Hall of Fame for Great Americans: A Biography of Stanford White’s Forgotten Memorial
Review By Paul Ranogajec
The Hall of Fame for Great Americans, a group memorial and patriotic monument on the campus of the Bronx Community College, is a rich site for interrogating a range of cultural and political questions about American society from the 1890s to the present. Sheila Gerami’s book brings the now obscure monument to the attention of art historians and others who might want to approach New York’s memorial landscape from new angles.
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The Power Keys
Exhibition Review, “Robert Caro’s the Power Broker at 50” and “‘Turn Every Page’: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive,” New-York Historical Society.
By Fran Leadon
Those tiny notes, scrawled on index cards and scraps of paper and taped to lampshades or thumbtacked to his famous office corkboard, are included in two microscopically immersive exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, both of which showcase the society’s acquisition, five years ago, of Caro’s voluminous papers. That trove has now yielded “Robert Caro’s The Power Broker at 50” (curated by Meredith Mann), which focuses on Caro’s Pulitzer-Prize winning 1974 biography of Robert Moses, and “‘Turn Every Page’: Inside the Robert A. Caro Archive” (curated by Michael Ryan, Edward O’Reilly, and Debra Schmidt Bach), which emphasizes the nitty-gritty of Caro’s writing process, especially as it relates to The Years of Lyndon Johnson, his sprawling four-volume biography of the 36th president (the long-awaited fifth volume is still in the offing).
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Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York
Review By J.J. Butts
Jordana Cox’s excellent study Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York explores the history of the New York Living Newspapers (NYLN) unit, revealing its complex engagement with news and performance. The focus on journalism within the FTP separates her book from many others on New Deal writing and performance arts. Scholars highlighting the value of the FTP and Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) have often made a case for them around the artistic innovations or careers they nourished. However, journalists constituted one of the major categories of writing professionals seeking work relief, and journalism prepared them for the kinds of fact-based work that typified many of the FTP and FWP productions. In consequence, Cox’s focus on the way the newsroom shaped and was reshaped by the Living Newspapers refreshingly spotlights a crucial element of the story of New Deal culture.
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Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power behind the Civil Rights Movement
Review By Dominique Jean-Louis
Tanisha Ford describes Mollie Moon, and social power brokers like her, as “the glue that connected Black social clubs, church groups, sororities, fraternities, and professional organizations into a national network of contributors who gave of their time and money to keep the movement afloat,” forming a “Black Freedom financial grid [that] established the economic base that supported the frontline activism of Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and John Lewis.” Mollie Moon was perhaps best known for her role as head of the National Urban League Guild, the social and volunteer auxiliary arm of the National Urban League, connecting a national grid of donors, activists, strategists and philanthropists
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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.
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The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront
Review By Tom Greenland
Professor Cisco Bradley’s book, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront, is product of a decade-long investigation into the creative music scene(s) hovering around Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood from 1988 to 2014, documenting its ostensible rise and fall. The narrative pits struggling DIY artists against the 2005 rezoning and consequent gentrification that brought economic sea changes on the area, a battle between art and capitalism, with capitalism the clear victor.
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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.
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