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Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History

 
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Kelley Kreitz, Printing Nueva York: Spanish-Language Print Culture, Media Change, and Democracy in the Late Nineteenth Century

Printing Nueva York: Spanish-Language Print Culture, Media Change, and Democracy in the Late Nineteenth Century

Review By Cathy Cabrera-Figueroa

Kelley Kreitz's Printing Nueva York is a compelling yet nuanced contribution to the historiography of New York. By highlighting the cultural and material significance of print within New York City's Spanish-speaking communities, Kreitz explores the city as a center for transnational exchange. The book demonstrates that New York was not only a local urban center but also an important hub for the broader hemisphere, linking Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States.

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The Pigs of The City of New York: 1624-1895

The Pigs of The City of New York: 1624-1895

By Johann Smoller - Marcotullio

Unbeknownst to the Dutch colonists, their successors, the English occupiers, the politicians of Tammany Hall, and ultimately the Progressive Reformers, would all adopt variations of this warlike framing on pigs. The details of the various conflagrations with swine of interest, along with the broader impacts and effects of pig-control and pig-eradication policies, had significant and lasting consequences. Ultimately, pigs hold an important place in the history of domesticated animals in urban areas.

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From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower: Charles G. Hine’s 1905 Photographic Survey of Broadway

From the Skyscraper to the Wildflower: Charles G. Hine’s 1905 Photographic Survey of Broadway

By Nick Yablon

In recent years, historians have turned to photograph albums to show how Americans memorialized love and death, how they visually constructed or challenged racial regimes, or how they engaged an emerging celebrity culture. But albums can also serve as crucial documents of urban history.  Reformers’ albums show how tenements, billboards, or street vendors were framed as problems requiring civic action; commemorative albums record how cities staged and remembered their civic anniversaries and public events; construction albums preserve the architectural histories of buildings and bridges; and vacation albums reveal tourist perceptions of urban sights.

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Unfriendly to Liberty: An Interview with Christopher F. Minty

Unfriendly to Liberty: An Interview with Christopher F. Minty

Interviewed By Dillon L. Streifeneder

Loyalists bring the Revolution back into focus as a lived experience shaped by uncertainty and competing commitments. They were woven into the fabric of New York’s political and economic life, participating in developments that defined the period. Their influence extended into the structures that endured. Patterns of association, habits of organization, and the expansion of political engagement continued beyond the moment of rupture. Recovering their history brings those elements into view and underscores the range of possibilities that existed before outcomes hardened into certainty.

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The Benab: Where Caribbean Culture Took Root in Queens

The Benab: Where Caribbean Culture Took Root in Queens

By Shafrana Carpen

By the mid-1980s, New York City had become a second home for tens of thousands of Caribbean immigrants. Guyanese, Trinidadians, Jamaicans, and others settled in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, bringing their cultures with them. Between 1980 and 1990, immigrants from the Caribbean made up almost a third of new arrivals, yet in those years, there were few places designed for them—no club where a nurse from Georgetown or a roofer from Berbice could truly feel at home. That absence gave rise to The Benab, a nightclub that became far more than a nightlife destination. Located on Jamaica Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, The Benab was one of the first Indo-Caribbean clubs in the borough and a central meeting point for a generation yearning to find a home away from home. 

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‘The Chance Begins to Assume a Fair Prospect’: Marc Brunel and the Invention of the Steamboat, Part 2

“The Chance Begins to Assume a Fair Prospect”: Marc Brunel and the Invention of the Steamboat — Part II

By Mark Kleinman

New York was still a very small city at that time. Its population doubled between 1790 and 1800, but was still only 60,000 at that date compared with 600,000 in Paris and 1 million in London. Brunel’s location first in Murray Street, then in George Street, placed him close to, among others, Nicholas Roosevelt, Alexander Hamilton and probably Robert Livingston’s town address. More generally, he was living and working in New York City just at the point when the still nascent city was beginning its rapid trajectory from local backwater to global metropolis.  

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Jailed for Freedom: Afro-Spanish Sailors and Legal Resistance in Eighteenth-Century New York

Jailed for Freedom: Afro-Spanish Sailors and Legal Resistance in Eighteenth-Century New York

By Beatriz Carolina Peña

The experiences of Fiallo and De la Torre reveal how Spanish American sailors captured through privateering were reclassified as “prize negroes,” sold, and forced to seek freedom within a legal system structured to uphold slavery. After arriving in New York from London as attorney general in November 1752, Kempe began bringing liberty claims grounded in the Law of Nations before the governor and council. These cases illuminate both the possibilities and the limits of law in a colonial society deeply committed to racialized slavery. Though they came from different Spanish colonies and reached New York about a year apart, their paths converged on July 7, 1753, when both were placed in jail for the protection of their freedom.

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‘The Chance Begins to Assume a Fair Prospect’: Marc Brunel and the Invention of the Steamboat, Part 1

“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. 

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Oaths and Interracial Solidarity: New York City’s 1741 Plot

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.

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Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

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.

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