In the summer of 1641, a Wiechquaskeck man murdered Claes Smits, an aged wheelwright who lived in a small house north of Fort Amsterdam. He had visited Smits’ house to exchange beaver skins for duffels of cloth. But as Smits bent over to grab the cloth from a chest, the Native man (the records have not preserved his name) struck him dead with an axe. The Commander of the Dutch garrison at Fort Amsterdam pursued the man back to his village and accosted him with questions.
The Invention of Public Space: An Interview with Mariana Mogilevich
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva speaks to Mariana Mogilevich about her recent book, The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York.Mogilevich discusses the 1960s and 1970s as a uniquely inventive time in the city for defining and conceptualizing the use of public space. At a time when New York was dealing with deindustrialization, economic decline, and suburbanization, the Lindsay Administration made a conscious effort to develop inviting public space and support public interaction in city spaces, an attempt to lift up the city’s density and shared space as an asset rather than a liability.
“She Wiggled Her Body in the Most Suggestive and Obscene Manner”: Sexuality and Respectability in the West Indian Labor Day Parade
By Marlene H. Gaynair
During the long 20th century, Caribbean carnival traditions and celebrations dispersed throughout the Atlantic World as West Indians migrated and settled in new locales. Carnival was not just limited to the Lenten period like in Trinidad and Tobago, Brazil, and New Orleans, but also took place around August 1st in the British Caribbean diaspora as a celebration for harvest and Emancipation. In New York City, the significant Caribbean community would recreate carnival celebrations in Trinidad and Tobago as the world-famous West Indian Labor Day Parade.
The Privatized City from Below: Benjamin Holtzman’s The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism
Reviewed by Bench Ansfield
“Ford to City: Drop Dead” weighs in as one of the most legendary headlines in US history, and its notoriety likely owes to the apparent disjuncture between the New York City of the 1970s fiscal crisis and the supertall glass-scape of today.[1] These two urban archetypes, apparently worlds apart, are intimately linked, and few books have done more to shape how we conceptualize the dawning of a new metropolis than The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, by the late geographer Neil Smith.
The Panic of 1907: How J.P. Morgan Took Over Wall Street
By Richard A. Naclerio
One of the most influential shapers of New York City’s history is Wall Street. The economic, social, demographic, and political impact the banking industry has had on New York City is undeniable in its scope and power. However, Wall Street itself is influenced by men who have harnessed and bridled it throughout its textured history. The consolidation of financial power is almost always a harbinger for the rise or fall of New York’s future, and no event was more exemplary of this effect than the little-known Panic of 1907, and no man amassed so much power from it than J.P. Morgan.
Eva Tanguay's Racial and Gender Iconoclasticism and the Making of “Personality”
By Jonathan Goldman
When Dorothy Parker wanted to dunk on Billie Burke’s performance in the new Somerset Maugham play, she called Burke's acting “an impersonation of Eva Tanguay.”The reference may be obscure now, but it was not then. In January 1920, Tanguay had been a New York fixture and international celebrity for over fifteen years. Crowned “Queen of Vaudeville” by an infatuated press, from 1905 on she commanded her industry's highest salaries.
A Sound as International as the City Itself: A Review of Benjamin Lapidus' New York and the International Sound of Latin Music, 1940-1990
Reviewed by Matthew Pessar Joseph
New York and the International Sound of Latin Music boasts an ambitious title. Yet Benjamin Lapidus’s history of Spanish Caribbean music in Gotham does not disappoint. By exploring overlooked Cuban, Puerto Rican, Panamanian, and Jewish performers, dancers, music teachers, and instrument builders, the author shows how between 1940 and 1990 New York served as a transnational mecca for Latinx music.
The Doctors Blackwell: An Interview with Janice Nimura
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, Gotham editor Katie Uva speaks to Janice Nimura, author of The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine. The book is a joint biography of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, and her sister Emily Blackwell, the third woman to do so. The book examines the Blackwells’ struggle to obtain training and credentials in the increasingly professionalized field of medicine in the 19th century, and also provides insights into 19th century New York as a place of opportunity and obstacles for these groundbreaking women.
Piecework, Peddlers, and Prostitutes: Intertwined Lives on the Lower East Side
By Deena Ecker
At the dawn of the 20th century, the stoop of 102 Allen Street, near the corner of Delancey Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side hopped with activity. Children played in front of the building, competing for space with “those women, called ‘Naphkes’” who would “say to men: ‘Come up’.” Isaac Yarmus, just 12 years old, said that when he “went on the stoop the Naphkes would take my hat and throw it into the street and tell me to keep away from the stoop.” Meanwhile, the building’s housekeeper, Hester Wolf, kept careful watch and would “say to the Naphkes: ‘Go inside’. when she saw a policeman or detective coming along the street.”
A Social History of Creative Work: Shannan Clark’s The Making of the American Creative Class
Reviewed by Emily Holloway
Shannan Clark’s The Making of the American Creative Class is, at first gloss, a rigorously detailed labor history of a particular subset of white-collar workers in the 20th century. Clark’s deliberately narrow sectoral focus — industrial design, print media, and advertising — also incorporates the complexities of cultural production under specific intellectual and political conditions. Rich with a detailed accounting of both the internal political strife within white-collar unions and the pervasive anticommunist anxiety of postwar America, Clark recovers a set of significant accomplishments among white-collar labor activists in mass culture.
