The Great Epizootic of 1872: Pandemics, Animals, and Modernity in 19th-Century New York City
By Oliver Lazarus
Monday, October 21st, 1872, began like many mid-fall days in New York — overcast and muggy with spitting rain, and a high of sixty-six degrees. Fall was supposed to mark the height of business in the city, when commerce and trade peaked. But as the week of October 21st dragged on, this seemingly unstoppable progress came to a halt. The cause of this stoppage was an attack on what is often dismissed as a vestige of that pre-modern city, but what was arguably New York’s most important energy supply: horsepower.
Read MoreThe New York City Overalls Parade, 1920
By Jonathan Goldman
New York City's "Overalls Parade," held on April 24, 1920 was, viewed generously, an inspired if quixotic attempt to inaugurate a new, labor-conscious political movement. From a more critical perspective, it was a neutered form of activism that undermined the progressive movements that had flourished over the previous two decades, now under threat at the start of the 1920s. In some respects, it even worked against the interests of labor. The "Economy Parade" – its official name never caught on – aimed to protest the rising cost of clothing as one instance of the rising cost of living in the postwar United States. Marchers, representing civic organizations and private clubs from multiple strata, wore overalls, a recent sartorial innovation, as a show of allegiance to democratic principles. Organized by the Cheese Club, a private social group whose members worked in theater, entertainment journalism, and publicity, the parade drew far fewer participants than predicted by its leaders and friendly journalists, and became a byword for failure.
Read MoreRevolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789
Reviewed by Jonathan W. Wilson
Have pity for John Holt. He lived in perilous times. As the publisher of the New-York Journal, and as a centrally located postmaster, Holt was poised to play an important role in the American Revolution. His evident sympathies were with the patriots. But he had to be careful.
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“Just Between Ourselves, Girls”: Rose Pastor Stokes and the American Yiddish Press
By Ayelet Brinn
n 1918, socialist agitator and women’s rights activist Rose Pastor Stokes (1879-1933) was tried and convicted of espionage after making public comments criticizing America’s involvement in World War I. After an anti-war speech in Kansas City, Stokes had published a letter in the Kansas City Star criticizing the American government for aligning with war profiteers to the detriment of the American people: “No government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, while the government is for the profiteers.”
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Great Grandma Barrett was a Shining Woman: Reflections on the Radium Girls and Industrial Disease
By Erin Elizabeth Becker
“The great wonders of the world are sometimes listed as the telephone, wireless telegraphy, radium, spectrum analysis, the airplane, anesthetics, and antitoxins and X rays”
- The Long Island Traveler, November 13, 1925
On February 27, 1905, Marion Murdoch O’Hara was born in New York City, the daughter of two immigrants. Her father, George P. O’Hara, had immigrated to the United States from Liverpool and found work in New York City as a janitor. Her mother, Marion Dunlop, was a housewife from Scotland. Growing up in New York City, the younger Marion lived with her parents and two sisters. At age seventeen, she married Aiden J. Barrett, a twenty-three-year-old immigrant from Newfoundland in Rutherford, New Jersey. “Great Grandma Barrett was a dancer in New York City,” family stories go, “and- before he met her- Great Grandpa Barrett was studying to be a Catholic priest!” The couple would go on to have nine children together- Rosemary, Marion, Florence, George, William, John, Patricia, Robert, and Alice. They lived in Mt Vernon, New York for a time, but by 1925, they had settled in the Bronx.
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Bad Faith: Teachers, Liberalism, and the Origins of McCarthyism
Reviewed by Clarence Taylor
For decades, pundits, conservative writers, and political officials have obscured the political and ideological differences between liberals, democratic socialists and communists. It is quite common for both rightwing Republicans and those in the mainstream media to label liberals as the “far Left,” in order to imply their ideas pose a danger to the country. In the 1988 presidential election, for example, George H. W. Bush called his Democratic opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, a “card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union,” equating membership in the ACLU with membership in the Communist Party. Several Republicans and members of the Tea Party have accused former President Barack Obama of being a “socialist.” President Donald Trump has labeled Democrats as “radicals” who have adopted a “far-left agenda.”
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City of Workers, City of Struggle
By Andy Battle
“City of Workers, City of Struggle.” Since its founding, New York has been emphatically both. A new exhibit with this name, up at the Museum of the City of New York until January, communicates the ways in which the shape of the present city — physical, economic, social, and cultural — has been given to us by the cumulative struggles of its workers for material well-being, autonomy, and a dignified life. The main goal, according to lead curator Steven H. Jaffe, is to communicate “just how intertwined the rise of modern New York City is with working people and their movements.”
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When Long Island City Was the Next Big Thing
By Ilana Teitel
For about a hundred days this winter, Long Island City was in the spotlight as a neighborhood about to be transformed. Amazon was coming, the national media was running articles about the 7 train, and brokers were selling condos via text messages. The word was out about this patch of western Queens and its waterfront views, central location, cultural diversity, and overtaxed infrastructure.
And then, on Valentine’s Day, it was over. Amazon pulled out and locals began to debate whether that much change would have been good or bad for LIC. But, this wasn’t the first time that Long Island City was the neighborhood that almost, maybe, soon, was about to take off. Here’s a look at three other times that LIC was briefly New York’s Next Big Thing.
History Museums and Capitalism: The Need for Critical Conversations
By Andrew Urban
In November, 2018, the Public Historian published a review that I wrote of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s newest tour: Under One Roof. The tour interprets the lives of three families who lived in the tenement at 103 Orchard Street — which was acquired by the museum in 2007 — from the 1940s up until the recent past. Addressing post-World War II immigration and migration to the Lower East Side, the educators leading the tours that I took did an excellent job highlighting how Americans have frequently been reluctant to welcome the world’s “huddled masses,” national myths notwithstanding.
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