Puerto Ricans who migrated to the United States in the early 20th century were not the first to do so. Trade and commerce linked Puerto Rico and the United States before the 19th century and movement between the two has continued since then. Piecing together the migration stories of Puerto Rican women who came to New York City after the Great War is quite challenging. These women were regular people, and until the 1960s and 1970s, there was little incentive to collect or archive their experiences.
The Cat Men of Gotham: An Interview With Peggy Gavan
Interviewed by Robb K. Haberman
Today on the Blog, Gotham editor Robb K. Haberman speaks to journalist and editor Peggy Gavan about her book, The Cat Men of Gotham: Tales of Feline Friendship in Old New York. Gavan discusses the prominent presence and activities of cats in New York City and their interactions with the city’s human residents during a period marked by decades of industrialization, immigration, and urban growth. In telling these stories, Gavan provides unique perspectives on the history of Gotham’s civic, cultural, financial, and social institutions.
Podcast Interview: All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants, and the Making of New York
Rob Snyder Interviewed by Bruce Cory
All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants, and the Making of New York by Frederick M. Binder, David M. Reimers, and Robert W. Snyder (Columbia University Press, 2019) covers almost 500 years of New York City’s still unfolding story of cultural diversity and political conflict, economic dynamism and unmatched human diversity.
The History of Gambling and the Future of Marijuana
By Matthew Vaz
With recreational marijuana crossing over to legalization in New York State, there is authentic optimism that the new system of regulation will be of benefit to the communities that have long been targeted by discriminatory policing. While these developments are encouraging, New York’s history with transforming illicit activity into budgetary salvation gives reason for caution. The largest endeavor of this kind was the tortured legalization of numbers gambling by the New York State Lottery, a historical process which featured many of the same themes of race, exclusion, and budget crisis.
Review: Robert A. McCaughey’s A College of Her Own: The History of Barnard
Reviewed by Kelly Marino
In A College of Her Own, scholar Robert McCaughey examines the history of Barnard College and the changes in its leadership, programs, and demographics from its founding in 1889 to the present. He argues that the school's administrators, location in New York City, and relationship with Columbia University made Barnard distinct among the “Seven Sisters,'' the group of elite women’s liberal arts colleges in the Northeast.
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.
Alice Neel believed that “art is a form of history.” Born in 1900, she claimed that “I represent the 20th century… I’ve tried to capture the zeitgeist.” Yet her painting bore no resemblance to the vast canvases of iconic scenes from the French revolution by Jacques-Louis David, Anne-Louis Girodot, or Theodore Gericault. Instead, she portrayed the history of the 20th century through individual people — neighbors, friends, artists, celebrities, and political activists — that she knew in New York City, a city which might be considered the capital of the 20th-century — the successor to Paris as “the capital of the 19th-century.”
Mexican (In)Visibility: Melissa Castillo Planas's Journey Into New York's Mexican State of Mind
Reviewed by Nelson Santana
When one thinks about Mexican migrants, often what comes to mind, partly due to conservative narratives, are Mexican-descended people in the US-Mexico border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. However, the Mexican community — some whose ancestors lived on Mexican land prior to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and who suddenly went from living in Mexico to living in the United States on the same land[1] — is dispersed throughout the United States with significant populations in Illinois, Washington, DC, and New York. The Mexican population in New York City is one that has been booming for quite some time.
Kara Murphy Schlichting Interviewed by Garrett Reed Gutierrez
In New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore, Kara Murphy Schlichting offers a fresh perspective on New York City’s history by shifting readers’ gaze away from Manhattan and towards the coastal periphery—where local planning initiatives, waterfront park building, the natural environment, and a growing leisure economy each had a stake in the regional development of New York City. Schlichting’s regional and environmental approach frames New York’s extensive waterways as points of connection that unite, rather than divide, the urban core and periphery to one another.
Dead Rivers and Day’s End: Cruising and Preserving New York’s Queer Imaginaries
By Fiona Anderson
Whenever I’m in New York, I make a point of spending time looking at the wooden pilings that stand in the Hudson, remnants of the warehouses and piers that occupied the waterfront until the mid-1980s. Gathered together in intimate coalition, they jut up and out along the riverside like rugged swimmers leaping in to rescue a drowning comrade. They look both like placeholders for future construction and hardy traces of a long-lost culture, like a forgotten work by Robert Smithson or an American Pompeii. This area is the subject of my recent book Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago Press, 2019),which looks at how and why this site hosted a vibrant cruising scene and art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
