Foiling Attempted Kidnappings in Antebellum New York

By David Fiske

The Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave shocked audiences a few years ago — not just with its depiction of the cruelty often endured by slaves — but also because of its acknowledgement of a tragic historical reality: that in those days a free-born African American could be kidnapped and enslaved. Sadly, the story told by the film — of Solomon Northup’s kidnapping and subsequent servitude — was not a story that was unique. Before the Civil War, kidnapping was conducted with a certain degree of regularity.

Antebellum & Civil War, Race & EthnicityGuest UserFebruary 22, 2018Comment

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

Retrieved Rhythms: The Last Poets, Harlem, and Black Arts Movement(s)

By Christopher M. Tinson

In 1953, illustrator Bernie Robynson, in an effort to diagram the culturally diverse and magnetic appeal of Harlem, mapped some of the enchanting points of interest sure to attract wide-eyed tourists. The resulting map entitled “In the Heart of Harlem” calls that section of New York City: “The Largest Negro Community in the World. Its Culture Is An Integral Part of Americana.” Over 12 years later, Harlem’s place in the American imagination would take on a different meaning for its inhabitants of African descent.

Arts & Culture, Politics, Postwar New York, Race & Ethnicity, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserJanuary 9, 2018Comment

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

Harlem's Missionaries to Africa: An Interview with Elisabeth Engel

Today on Gotham, editor Nick Juravich sits down with historian Elisabeth Engel, to speak about her experience writing her first book, Encountering Empire, on the lives of African American Missionaries in colonial Africa during the early twentieth century, and her thoughts on the subject since the monograph was published.

Interviews, Progressive Era, Race & Ethnicity, ReligionGuest UserDecember 28, 2017Comment

Coming Home to Harlem: The New Home of Missions in the Black American Community

By Elisabeth Engel

In Encountering Empire, historian Elisabeth Engel traces how black American missionaries — men and women grappling with their African heritage — established connections in Africa during the heyday of European colonialism. Reconstructing the black American “colonial encounter,” a neglected chapter of Atlantic history, Engel analyzes the images, transatlantic relationships, and possibilities of representation African American missionaries developed for themselves while negotiating colonial regimes. Between 1900 and 1939, these missionaries paved the way for the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the oldest independent black American institution, to establish a presence in Britain's sub-Saharan colonies. African Americans thus used imperial structures for their own self-determination.

This post, drawn from the book's fourth chapter, discusses how concepts of home crystallized a counterculture of diasporic pan-Africanism within AME missionary circles. A key part of defining “home” for these missionaries was moving to a new headquarters in Harlem.

Progressive Era, Race & Ethnicity, ReligionGuest UserDecember 26, 2017Comment

Jewish New York

By Geraldine Gudefin

Whether they are thinking of bagels or Woody Allen, to many Americans, Jews are intimately connected, if not synonymous with New York. Jewish New York, an edited volume from New York University Press out this month, explores the historical developments that have led to this association and asks: "when and in what sense did New York become a city of promises for Jews"? The book is a condensed version of the prize-winning City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York (2012), the first comprehensive history on the subject. Synthesizing three volumes into one single tome, it is also half the length, at 500 pages. The book, which contains essays by Jeffrey S. Gurock, Annie Polland, Howard B. Block, and Daniel Soyer, has greatly benefited from the careful editing of Deborah Dash Moore, a prominent historian of Jewish America. Organized into broad themes, the book is divided into four parts that follow a roughly linear chronological arc, from the colonial period to the present, with eleven chapters and a visual essay by art historian Diana L. Linden.

Race & Ethnicity, Religion, ReviewsGuest UserDecember 7, 2017Comment