Gotham

Gotham

Represents the most comprehensive examination to date of the city’s history prior to 1900. Indeed, few historians today attempt synthetic and comprehensive interpretations of this magnitude. The authors weave together the unique details of New York City’s history with a generation’s worth of recent and original scholarship, insightfully reconceptualizing the city’s past.... Gotham is filled with engaging vignettes and vivid narratives. The stories of Abraham Lincoln’s visits to New York in 1860 and 1861, [and] the description of the draft riots of 1863 (still the deadliest incident of urban disorder in American history)... are among the best short historical accounts readers will find anywhere...
— Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Atlantic Monthly (February 1999)

Reviews

The Observer, April 20, 1999
By Jan Morris

'Cities of themselves are nothing without an historian,' wrote Washington Irving, only half in irony, and Messrs Burrows and Wallace have lived up to his precept with a vengeance.

New York Times, December 13, 1998
By Clyde Haberman

One of the first things you learn on picking up Gotham — in itself no easy task, this super-thick book being heavy enough to cause back spasms — ​is that Gotham is Anglo-Saxon for "Goats' Town." Who knew?

Journal of American History 86 no. 2 (1999)
By Edward K. Spann


Reviews in American History 27, no. 2 (1999)
By Jeanne Chase


American Historical Review 105, no. 2 (2000)
By David Hammack


Economic History Review 53, no. 1 (2000)
By Karen Wills


Journal of Interdisciplinary History 30, no. 4 (2000)
By Thomas Bender


The American Enterprise 10, no. 4 (1999)
By George J. Marlin


Canadian Journal of History 36, no. 1 (April 2001)
By Keith Cassidy

The Geographical Review 92, no. 1 (January 2002)
By Brian J. Godfrey

Journal of Urban Affairs 25, no. 3 (2003)
By David Bartelt