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Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History

 
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Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

Review By Dillon L. Streifeneder

That the English took New Netherland from the Dutch in 1664 is well known. Why the English seized the Dutch colony, along with the circumstances of how they managed to achieve their conquest, however, remain largely forgotten to all but a small number of professional historians and archivists. Russell Shorto’s Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America, in what is surely the most comprehensive and accessible account of the English conquest, is therefore a welcome addition to scholarship on New York’s Dutch period and well-worth the read.

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New York Sari: An Interview with Curator Salonee Bhaman

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.

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“In Any Character Except that of a British Subject”: The Staten Island Diplomatic Peace Conference of 1776

“In Any Character Except that of a British Subject”: The Staten Island Diplomatic Peace Conference of 1776

By Phillip Papas

The conference on Staten Island delayed the British military campaign, providing General Washington with more time to prepare his troops for the inevitable battle for New York City (lower Manhattan). Four days after the “negotiation” the British recaptured New York, forcing the Continental Army’s retreat. The Howe brothers believed the defeat, like the humiliation in Brooklyn, would result in a bid for peace. But the conference on Staten Island exposed the flaw in that logic, since the leadership in Congress was beyond persuasion. It confirmed the irreconcilable differences between the two sides, only stiffening the resolve of each to continue, until the war itself, and the long train of nightmares it produced, forced the British to relent.

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Jeffrey A. Kroessler: Rural County, Urban Borough

Laura Heim: Rural County, Urban Borough

Interviewed by Rob Snyder

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.

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Tell Her Story: An Interview with LaShawn Harris

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.

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Henry H. Sapoznik: The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City

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.

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Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar (ed.), Black Movement: African American Urban History Since the Great Migration

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.

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The Art of Blackwell's Island

The Art of Blackwell's Island

By Kristen Osborne-Bartucca

Hopper’s second work depicting the island, Blackwell’s Island (1928), is stark and unsettling, related mostly in title to the 1911 piece. […] The river, a bright cerulean blue, occupies the bottom half of the canvas, and the top half consists of pale blue sky and odd clouds receding into the distance. All of the infamous institutions on the island are there, but by now had almost ceased operating. Hopper paints them as flattened, simplified, and lit brilliantly by the sun. Like most of his works, there is something slightly off about the scene — it is too quiet, too placid. Though the buildings are banal, Hopper suggests that there is something ominous that occurred within their walls.

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Contributions Have Poured in from All Classes, from All Sects: New York City and Great Hunger in Ireland

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.”

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Men at Work: A New Look at the Central Park Gates

Men at Work: A New Look at the Central Park Gates

By Sara Cedar Miller

Pass through any of Central Park's twenty original entrances today (Figure 1), and you're walking through spaces defined more by absence than presence. These "gates" are really just gaps in the perimeter wall, full of intention never realized — invisible stories of artistic talent, social connection, and personal ambition in antebellum New York. Like the carefully framed views created by Central Park’s designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, they offer at its threshold a glimpse into unseen forces that shaped America's first great public space.

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