Stokely Carmichael: The Boy Before Black Power

By Ethan Scott Barnett

In the 1960 edition of The Observatory, The Bronx High School of Science’s yearbook, the recently appointed principal Alexander Taffel pronounced to the graduating class a quote from Thomas Paine: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Paine had recognized the approaching revolution in 1776; the class of 1960 anticipated a similar upheaval. Amongst a sea of young faces in the sports section are two boys - one Black and one white - energetically shaking hands and displaying cheeky smiles. The boys are surrounded by their male teammates and the female management crew. Sports editors Judy Shapiro and Joel Engelstein captioned the image, “Stokely Carmichael and Gene Dennis showed their masterly leadership in preventing the abasement of the opposing teams.” Upon a first and even a second glance this image simply depicts the camaraderie that comes along with teenage boys and secondary school soccer games. However, the image pinpoints a pivotal moment in Stokely Carmichael’s political trajectory. The experiences that led up to this moment concretized Carmichael’s dedication to leftist organizing and a lifelong career in the Black Freedom Struggle.

Bronx, Education, Race & Ethnicity, Postwar New YorkGuest UserDecember 5, 2019Comment

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.

Business & Labor, Medicine & Public Health, Metropolitan RegionGuest UserDecember 3, 2019Comment

Representing the Whole: An Interview with Dennis RedMoon Darkeem

Representing the Whole: An Interview with Dennis Redmoon Darkeem

Interviewed by Pilar Jefferson

One of the most thought provoking pieces to share and discuss with visitors since Urban Indian: Native New York Now opened at the Museum of the City of New York in late September has been “Flag” by Dennis Redmoon Darkeem. Hanging in the center of the north wall of the gallery, it sits a little apart from the posters and flyers around it, and the bold colors and patterns of the large rectangular work draw viewers in. The quilted fabric pieces that form the work create visually engaging aesthetic contrasts, and those same colors and patterns draw questions of deeper meaning from the viewer. Are the blue stars on a white background an inversion of the American flag? What is the source of the strip of checked green yellow orange and black fabric that cuts across the piece, bisecting it?

Interviews, Race & EthnicityGuest UserNovember 26, 2019Comment

Fraternal Purpose in the Establishment of Tammany’s “American Museum”

By Timothy Winkle

On May 21, 1791, a notice appeared in New York’s Daily Advertiser, announcing the opening of what would be the first public museum in the city. It had been established “for the purpose of collecting and preserving every thing relating to the history of America, likewise, every American production of nature or art.” The “generous public” was implored to help grow the collections, an appeal not only to wealthy patrons or men of science, but, in true republican fashion, to the people themselves, for “as almost every individual possesses some article, which in itself is of little value, but in a collective view, becomes of real importance.” It would truly be an “American Museum,” of the people, by the people, and for the people. Unlike other collections of the period, this museum was uniquely created by a fraternal organization, one that most citizens of New York City knew from their parades through the streets, members dressed in supposed Indian garb. The Society of Tammany, or Columbian Order, sought to keep the spirit of patriotism alive in the hearts and minds of the city’s populace, and this museum, “although quite in its infancy,” was born of this same fraternal purpose.

Guest UserNovember 21, 2019Comment

Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

Reviewed by Jocelyn Wills

In his latest book on city planning and the built environment, Thomas J. Campanella tackles the history of his hometown, Brooklyn, once, and until the consolidation of New York City’s five boroughs in 1898, the fourth-largest city in the United States. In 18 chronological episodes, Campanella follows Brooklyn’s history from the 17th-century encounter between the native Leni Lenape and immigrant Dutch, through its revolutionary experience, and on to its 19th-century rise and 20th-century decline as a major urban-industrial zone. Following a discussion of Brooklyn’s demise during the turbulent 1950s-1970s, Campanella then provides a short epilogue that considers the borough’s more recent revivification as a hot-spot of gentrification. Brooklyn: The Once and Future City thus joins a growing number of scholarly works attempting to rescue Brooklyn from is historic treatment as a “city of homes and churches” and America’s “first suburb.” Indeed, over the past twenty years, excellent monographs employing Brooklyn as a significant site for scholarly inquiry have finally begun to replace the coffee-table books that long lined the two or three shelves that New York City bookstores devoted to Brooklyn and Kings County.

Guest UserNovember 19, 2019Comment

Building for Us: Stories of Homesteading and Cooperative Housing

Reviewed by Katie Uva

New York City is in the throes of a housing crisis. Soaring housing costs and stagnant wages have left increasing numbers of New Yorkers rent-burdened, and have moved the possibility of homeownership even farther out of reach in a city that has always been dominated by renters. Pro-growth voices argue that rezoning and incentivizing private developers to do more building would open up supply and alleviate the crisis; progressives resist that narrative and see such ideas as furthering the city’s capitulation to the private sector and worsening the tension between housing as an asset versus housing as a right. Conflicts abound about how to create affordable housing, how to define affordable housing, and how to sustain affordable housing.

Housing & Realty, ReviewsGuest UserNovember 14, 2019Comment

How States Shaped Postwar America: State Government and Urban Power

Reviewed By Michael R. Glass

New York City residents are often lampooned, perhaps justifiably, for their provincialism. As the iconic 1976 New Yorker cover encapsulated, for many New Yorkers the world might as well end at the Hudson River. But consider how much the state government affects their daily lives. Every morning, the typical New Yorker commutes on a subway car financed with state-backed bonds. If they work in the financial district or in Times Square, they likely ascend an office tower constructed with state tax subsidies. If they attend a business convention, take the bar exam, or mourn at a presidential election party, they will find themselves in the glass cubes of a state-built convention center. For college, many will attend a public university elsewhere in the state, or if they stay closer to home, a city university, where the state still pays over half the operating costs. For a quick weekend get-away, they will drive on a state-maintained highway to a hiking trail, campground, or ski resort at a state-run park in the Catskills or Adirondacks.

Guest UserNovember 12, 2019Comment

Sight and Memory at the Crossroads in Manhattan

By Marjorie N. Feld

First, as with so many things, the Manhattan course needed a name. In 2017, the Glavin Office of Multicultural and International Education asked me to teach Babson College’s first undergraduate “elective away,” an in-depth history of Manhattan to be taught in Manhattan. As with students on campuses across the country, Babson students of all backgrounds are increasingly accessing electives abroad; this was a full-credit course within U.S. Borders—away and not abroad—and it needed a name.

Guest UserNovember 7, 2019Comment

Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music and Dance in New York, 1840-1917

Everybody’s Doin’it: Sex, Music and Dance in New York, 1840-1917

Reviewed by Jeffrey Escoffier

Dirty Dancing, the 1987 movie starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, exploited a common cultural trope: the intimate connection many people feel between dancing and sex. It portrayed a couple whose dancing was explicitly sexual, who came from different social classes and who at the same time were falling in love. For many of its viewers, it presented a very romantic vision of the connection between sex and dancing. Dale Cockrell’s Everybody’s Doin’it: Sex, Music and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 2019) sets out to explore a more historical account of the interrelationship between popular music, social dancing and sexuality in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. As he shows, the making of popular music during the nineteenth-century often took place in bars, brothels and dance halls where prostitution was endemic. Social dancing was one of the ways that sex and music are linked.

Reviews, Gender & Sexuality, Antebellum & Civil War, Gilded AgeGuest UserNovember 5, 2019Comment

Roar, Lion, Roar: Columbia Football History

By Joanna Rios and Jocelyn Wilk

This fall, the staff of the Columbia University Archives curated an exhibition at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library's Chang Octagon entitled "Roar, Lion, Roar: A Celebration of Columbia Football" (August 26-December 20, 2019). It's been a labor of love for us and we are thrilled to share the stories, artwork, photographs, and documents that tell the history of one of the oldest college football programs in the country. Our exhibit consists of six wall cases and three display cubes. It is not the biggest of spaces, but in it, we are able to showcase the places, the people, and the high and low points of this distinguished athletic program. But not everything can make it into the exhibit.

Guest UserOctober 31, 2019Comment

Gotham

Stokely Carmichael: The Boy Before Black Power

Great Grandma Barrett was a Shining Woman: Reflections on the Radium Girls and Industrial Disease

Representing the Whole: An Interview with Dennis Redmoon Darkeem

Fraternal Purpose in the Establishment of Tammany’s “American Museum”

Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

Building for Us: Stories of Homesteading and Cooperative Housing

How States Shaped Postwar America: State Government and Urban Power

Sight and Memory at the Crossroads in Manhattan

Everybody’s Doin’it: Sex, Music and Dance in New York, 1840-1917

Roar, Lion, Roar: Columbia Football History