Brooklyn’s Renaissance: Commerce, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Reviewed by Jocelyn A Wills

One never knows where a family heirloom will lead. Brooklyn’s Renaissance began with a cultural artifact that Italian Renaissance scholar Melissa Meriam Bullard’s mother inherited from a distant cousin: a portrait of Luther Boynton Wyman (1804-79), a forgotten shipping merchant for Liverpool’s Black Ball Line, long-time resident of Brooklyn Heights, and “guiding hand” in the founding of the “arts-friendly community” along Montague Street during the 1850s and 1860s (with the Academy of Music, now “BAM,” as Brooklyn’s cultural center).

Brooklyn, Antebellum & Civil War, Arts & Culture, Business & Labor, Reviews, Waterfront & IslandsGuest UserFebruary 20, 2018Comment

The Struggle for Teacher Education in 19th Century New York

By Sandra Roff

Teaching as a profession aims to achieve the most noble of principles — educating children to be responsible, productive citizens. Unfortunately, the teachers hired in the early years of the new republic and well into the nineteenth century were usually untrained and unprepared for the job ahead. The civic-minded movers and shakers in New York City at the time were interested in the education of its youth, but the path to securing qualified teachers for the schools was slow to be realized.

Antebellum & Civil War, Education, PoliticsGuest UserJanuary 25, 2018 Comment

Solomon Northup’s Family in New York City

By David Fiske

Around the end of the winter in 1841, Solomon Northup encountered two men in Saratoga Springs, New York, who promised him work if he’d travel with them to New York City. Northup was a free black man who had lived in the resort for about seven years, where he had done various sorts of work to support his wife and three children. The two men, who were from a neighboring county, probably understood that employment in Saratoga was harder to find during the winter months when all the tourists were not around — therefore they had a good chance of finding a potential victim in need of cash.

Antebellum & Civil War, Politics, Race & EthnicityGuest UserJanuary 23, 2018 Comment

The Tree That Still Grows in Brooklyn, And Almost Everywhere Else

Catherine McNeur

The Tree of Heaven, or Ailanthus, gained fame in 1943 as a symbol of endurance in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. In this book about a plucky, determined girl from the tenements of Brooklyn, the tree seemed to embody her spirit. It thrived in cities while other plants withered. As Smith put it, “No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenement districts.” Today, if you ask an urban forester about Ailanthus trees, you’ll find that it’s exactly that kind of resilience that they find most frustrating. Today the Tree of Heaven is considered an invasive species and a problem to be solved. This was not always the case.

Antebellum & Civil War, Nature & Environment, Race & EthnicityGuest UserJanuary 4, 2018 Comments