Late Colonial-Era New York City Lawyers and the Building of a Provincial Legal Community
By Sung Yup Kim
From the early 1760s to the eve of the Revolution, Albany lawyer Peter Silvester and Attorney General John Tabor Kempe collaborated on at least a dozen cases in the colony of New York. On many occasions, Silvester acted as a de facto agent for the New York City-based Kempe, sometimes assisting the latter in his public duties as attorney general of the colony. When Kempe needed information about an Albany resident charged with assaulting a neighbor, for example, Silvester examined the local court minutes to check if the person had any criminal record, or if there were outstanding charges against him in any of the local courts.
Review: The Great Migration and the Democratic Party
Reviewed by Christopher Shell
The migration of roughly six million Black Americans to the North between 1915-1965 is the subject of Keneshia N. Grant’s book, The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century. In the United States popular imagination, when we think about the Great Migration, we may think about its cultural implications such as the Harlem Renaissance, the New Negro movement, or Motown. Perhaps we think about its impact on Black radical activity such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Nation of Islam, or the Black Panther Party. Grant’s study, rather, urges readers to reconceptualize the Great Migration as an event that critically transformed the northern political system.
Transatlantic Radicalism in Early National New York
By Sean Griffin
New York City has long been considered a hotbed of radical political ideas, as well as a cosmopolitan center of culture and commerce. But while the roots of the latter have been traced back to the city’s origins as a Dutch trading post with a decidedly commercial outlook and a polyglot population, fewer historians have explored the origins of the city’s radical political culture.
Anti-Asian Violence and Acts of Community Care from the 1980s to the Present
Vivian Truong Interviewed by Hongdeng Gao
Today on the Blog, Gotham’s editor Hongdeng Gao speaks with Vivian Truong, author of “From State-Sanctioned Removal to the Right to the City” and a core committee member of the A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project.Truong discusses segregationist and police violence against Asian American, Black and Latinx residents in southern Brooklyn in the 1980s and 1990s and the cross-group, cross-issue movements that developed in response to such violence.
The Complicated Legacy of Paul Moss, La Guardia’s Infamous “Gutter-Cleaner”
By Jonathan Kay
Outside the conference room at the Bow Tie Partners offices in Times Square, there is a framed letter, dated September 5, 1944, addressed to one “Master Charles B. Moss, Jr.” — the grandson of legendary New York City film exhibitor B.S. Moss (1878-1951), who still presides over the family film and real-estate business.
On a winter day in February 1967, pedestrians gawked as a young African American man walked along Fifth Avenue in New York City: He stood 6 feet, 3 inches tall, aged twenty-five and he was clearly in fighting shape.[1]
“Is that you, Muhammad Ali?’ one woman exclaimed. “You're so handsome."
“People Love the Rat”: How Scabby, Labor’s Mascot, Took New York
By Benjamin Serby
Anyone who has spent time in New York will not be surprised to learn that it is the most rat-infested city in the United States, with an estimated population of two million (roughly one rat for every four people). Strangely, rats are part of the city’s culture — and long have been. As Luc Sante explains in Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, rat-baiting was the city’s “premier betting sport” in the 19th century. Boys were paid to collect rats from the street “at a rate of five to twelve cents a head,” and spectators wagered on how quickly fox terriers or “men wearing heavy boots” could massacre dozens of them at a time.
“For the Use of the State”: Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan and the Work of New York’s Archives
By Derek Kane O’Leary
In mid-winter of 1847, Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan was a historian with an unfinished book manuscript who needed a decent-paying job. He was hip deep in his two-volume History of New Netherland; or, New York under the Dutch (1846-1848), the first major historical account of the state’s Dutch colonial period aside from Washington Irving’s satirical History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809) — which O’Callaghan and many other history-conscious New Yorkers were keen to forget.
The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War
Van Gosse interviewed by Jessica Georges
It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections.
Podcast Interview: Patria: Puerto Rican Revolutionaries in Nineteenth Century New York
Edgardo Meléndez Interviewed by Jesse Hoffnung-Garskoff
Edgardo Meléndez's book Patria: Puerto Rican Revolutionaries in Nineteenth Century New York (Centro Press, 2019) examines the activities and ideals of Puerto Rican revolutionary exiles in New York City at the end of the nineteenth century. The study is centered in the writings, news reports, and announcements by and about Puerto Ricans in Patria, the official newspaper of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. Both were founded and led by the Cuban patriot José Martí.
