“The Chance Begins to Assume a Fair Prospect”: Marc Brunel and the Invention of the Steamboat — Part I
By Mark Kleinman
The Colonel and the Chancellor now had the monopoly, the ideas and the enthusiasm. What they lacked, however, was an actual working steam engine. Here they had two options: they could import a suitable steam engine from England, preferably from the world-leading workshop of Matthew Boulton and James Watt in Soho, Birmingham. Or, they could build their own steam engine in the primitive engineering landscape of 1790s America, with a dearth of both suitable machinery and skilled engineers.
Oaths and Interracial Solidarity: New York City’s 1741 Plot
By Kevin Murphy
In early 1741, an investigation into a robbery in Manhattan led to rumors of an interracial plot to destroy the city. Local officials tracked stolen coins and other items to John Hughson, a tavern-keeper known for serving enslaved people. Authorities were already concerned about illicit rendezvouses among slaves, soldiers, and poor whites; their suspicions spiked, however, when a series of unexplained fires started at Fort George and then at various places across the city. Mary Burton, the Hughson’s sixteen-year-old “Irish servant girl,” came forward to implicate her “master” and his customers, painting a vivid picture of impending mayhem.
Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America
Review By Dillon L. Streifeneder
That the English took New Netherland from the Dutch in 1664 is well known. Why the English seized the Dutch colony, along with the circumstances of how they managed to achieve their conquest, however, remain largely forgotten to all but a small number of professional historians and archivists. Russell Shorto’s Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America, in what is surely the most comprehensive and accessible account of the English conquest, is therefore a welcome addition to scholarship on New York’s Dutch period and well-worth the read.
New York Sari: An Interview with Curator Salonee Bhaman
Interviewed By Dominique Jean-Louis
Our social, material, and emotional worlds are shaped by history that is often far more complicated and varied than what we’re likely to learn in a classroom. I hope that people come away from this exhibition with a curiosity to learn more about how and why the things they love in this city — be it a beautiful and colorful fabric or a funky groove, or a tasty and transcendent meal — got to where they are and then follow that curiosity to learn more about the people that brought that thing, or food, or color palate into their lives. New York is a city of immigrants. It has been for a very long time. The themes of displacement, segregation, and persecution that often suffuse our stories of migration come to exist alongside a different set of narratives in this place: stories of community forged across differences of culture and experience.
“In Any Character Except that of a British Subject”: The Staten Island Diplomatic Peace Conference of 1776
By Phillip Papas
The conference on Staten Island delayed the British military campaign, providing General Washington with more time to prepare his troops for the inevitable battle for New York City (lower Manhattan). Four days after the “negotiation” the British recaptured New York, forcing the Continental Army’s retreat. The Howe brothers believed the defeat, like the humiliation in Brooklyn, would result in a bid for peace. But the conference on Staten Island exposed the flaw in that logic, since the leadership in Congress was beyond persuasion. It confirmed the irreconcilable differences between the two sides, only stiffening the resolve of each to continue, until the war itself, and the long train of nightmares it produced, forced the British to relent.
Rural County, Urban Borough is a history with a strong sense of place. Covering the the history of Queens from European settlement to the present, Kroessler charts centuries of change in the landscape. He shows how politics, industry, transportation, government and real estate interests all shaped the borough. Linking Queens to New York City and the wider world, Kroessler illuminates important elements of American metropolitan history.
