Before the sensational cases of Amanda Knox and Casey Anthony — before even Lizzie Borden — there was Polly Bodine, the first American woman put on trial for capital murder in our nation’s debut media circus.

On Christmas night in 1843, neighbors in a serene village on Staten Island discovered the remains of twenty-four-year-old mother Emeline Houseman and her infant daughter Ann Eliza, bludgeoned to death and burned in a fire. When an ambitious district attorney charged Emeline’s sister-in-law with the murders, the new “penny press” exploded. Polly Bodine was a perfect villain for the media. When Bodine assembled a legal dream-team, the debate expanded from the question of her guilt to her character as a “fallen woman,” a separated wife who committed adultery, had several abortions, and drank gin. Between 1844 and 1846, reporting on three separate trials over the “Christmas murders” enthralled the city and nation. Edgar Allen Poe and Walt Whitman covered the story as young newsmen. P. T. Barnum made a circus out of it. James Fenimore Cooper’s last novel was inspired by it.

The Witch of New York is the first narrative history of the dueling trial lawyers, ruthless newsmen, and shameless hucksters who turned the case into America’s formative “tabloid trial.” In this origin story about how the US became addicted to sensationalized criminal trials, Alex Hortis (author of The Mob and the City) vividly reconstructs an epic mystery from old New York and uses it to challenge our system of tabloid justice of today.

During the New Deal and World War II, Fiorello La Guardia became perhaps the most famous mayor in the history of New York City. But there is a part of his story that is only now being told. Since the establishment of the Police Department in the mid-1800s, leaders of the NYPD had often served as partners to partisan political power. That changed with La Guardia. But his approach to low-level policing anticipated later trends in law enforcement, including "broken windows" and "stop and frisk.” Officers worked to preserve order by controlling vice, including juvenile delinquency, prostitution, gambling, and "disorderly" establishments. But that often brought them into conflict with socially targeted groups, in particular Black New Yorkers. With the Depression and wartime conditions spurring youth crime, stories featuring Black "hoodlums" were emblazoned all over the media, driving expanded patrols in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Blacks called for protection and more equitable resources, but mainly saw more punishment. This set the stage for an uprising, the Harlem riot of 1943.

In this conversation, Emily Brooks and Shannon King discuss their new studies, Gotham’s War within a War and The Politics of Safety, and the question of whether this period should be viewed as the “birth of law and order liberalism.”

Half of the languages spoken on Earth (7,000-plus) may disappear this century. And because many have never been recorded, when they’re gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history, New York. In Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York, he follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities, from the streets of Brooklyn and Queens to villages on the other side of the world, to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against the odds. He explores the languages themselves, from rare sounds to sentence-long words to bits of grammar that encode entirely different worldviews.

On the 100th anniversary of the law that closed America’s borders for decades and the 400th anniversary of NYC’s colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about this growing threat and the onslaught of “killer languages” like English and Spanish, while celebrating New York’s profound linguistic diversity and the joy of tuning into this modern Babel.

Nancy Foner, author or editor of twenty books, including From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration, joins in conversation.

William L. Laurence was arguably the most prominent science writer in America during the early Cold War. But the Pulitzer-winning New York Times journalist had a secret. Like so many others in media, science, the arts, and culture, he was on the government payroll.

In Atomic Bill, Vincent Kiernan presents the first biography of this highly influential figure. A Harvard Law graduate, in the 1930s Laurence was an up-and-comer at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, a pioneer of “yellow journalism.” But his big break came when he was recruited to write much of the press on the Manhattan Project on the day President Truman incinerated Hiroshima. That crowned him as one of the leading experts on the nuclear bomb during the 1940s and ‘50s. Hailed by most as a skilled translator of science, critics saw him as a propagandist, cashing in on the militarization of science amid the new existential arms race. Laurence used his perch at the Times to reach new heights of fame and fortune in speechmaking, book writing, filmmaking, and radio broadcasting. But his work declined in quality as his relationship to power grew more lucrative, eventually leading to scandal and forced retirement over his connections to Robert Moses and the 1964 World’s Fair. Kiernan, a veteran science reporter and communications scholar (author of Embargoed Science), argues that Laurence “set the trend, common among today's journalists… to prioritize gee-whiz coverage” at the expense of critical reporting on science and technology.

In this new biography, Nicholas L. Syrett tells the story of one of the most infamous abortionists of the nineteenth century, a tale with unmistakable parallels to the current war over reproductive rights. “Madame Restell,” the nom de guerre of the most successful female physician in America, sold birth control, delivered children, and performed abortions for decades in a series of clinics run out of her home in New York City. But it was the abortions that made her infamous, “Restellism” becoming a term detractors used to indict her.

Abortion was then largely unregulated in most of the United States, including New York. But a sense of disquiet arose about single women flocking to the city for work and greater sexual freedom, amid changing views of motherhood, with fewer children born to white, married, middle-class women. Restell came to stand for everything threatening the status quo. From 1829 onward, restrictions on abortion began to put her in legal jeopardy. For much of this period she prevailed—until she didn’t. The Trials of Madame Restell: Nineteenth-Century America’s Most Infamous Female Physician and the Campaign to Make Abortion a Crime paints an unforgettable picture of the mid-nineteenth-century New York and brings Restell to the attention of a whole new generation of women in the current fight over reproductive choice.

Mary Ziegler, Professor of Law at UC Davis and the author of numerous books on the modern day struggle, joins in conversation.

In their new book, Mobilizing the Metropolis, Philip Mark Plotch and Jen Nelles describe how the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — the nation’s first public authority — changed in ways that would make it unrecognizable to its founders. Over the past 100 years, the agency’s mission has evolved from improving rail freight to building motor vehicle crossings, airports, office towers, industrial parks, and even a failing commuter rail line. Often viewed with admiration during its early years, it became a target of criticism as it took control of airfields and marine terminals and constructed large bridges and tunnels. Mayors of New York and Newark argued that it should be broken up, echoing others that deemed it a “super-government” that must be reined in.

Yet despite its travails, the Port Authority overcame hurdles that had frustrated other public and private efforts. It built the world's longest suspension bridge, and took a leading role in creating an organization to reduce traffic delays in the region. How did it achieve these successes? And what lessons does it offer to other cities and regions? In a time when public agencies are often condemned as inefficient and corrupt, its history of struggle — between the public and private sectors, democratic accountability and efficiency, regional and local needs — offers lessons for both governmental officials and social reformers. Plotch and Nelles have produced what Jim Burnley, the former U.S. Secretary of Transportation, calls “both the definitive history of the Port Authority and an impressive critical analysis of its evolution, strengths, and weaknesses over its century-long existence. Highly readable, it contains important lessons about how any public authority should, or should not, be created and operated.” 

What is it about Times Square that has inspired so much attention, despite its many profound changes, for more than a century? In Times Square Remade, Lynne B. Sagalyn masterfully recounts the story of this symbolic space’s hold on the public imagination, twenty years after her widely acclaimed Times Square Roulette. The book chronicles its history, from its early days as the nexus of speculation and competitive theater building to its darkest period as vice central, and the years of aggressive public-private intervention that followed, cleansing West 42nd Street and nearby areas like Hell’s Kitchen of pornography and crime.

Accompanied by nearly 160 images, Times Square Remade is a deftly woven narrative of urban transformation that will appeal as much to the general reader as to urbanists, city planners, architects, urban designers, and policymakers. Kenneth T. Jackson, Editor-in-Chief of The Encyclopedia of New York City, writes, “no other intersection on Earth has been as iconic, famous, and frequented as the crossroads of the world in New York. And no other person has written with such authority and knowledge about the place as Lynne Sagalyn.” Sharon Zukin, author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, adds, “Sagalyn's erudition marches off every page.”

John Mollenkopf, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, joins in conversation.

In his new book, Unfriendly to Liberty, Christopher F. Minty revises our understanding of the American Revolution by exploring the lives of the many New Yorkers who chose to side with the British in the rebellion. Arguing that would-be “loyalists” formed an organized group long before the events at Lexington and Concord, Minty recounts how these men, elite and nonelite, championed an inclusive political economy that advanced the public good and strongly protested Parliament's reorientation of North American colonial policy during the Imperial Crisis (1763-75). But rather than locating the critical divide in this era, he identifies the major political and social turning point as lying in the disputes that emerged from the Seven Years War (1756-63). Those events, he argues, created a united force that made New York a headquarters for loyalism in the colonies all during the years that followed. “With dazzling research, sharp insights, and gripping narrative,” the acclaimed historian Benjamin L. Carp writes, “Unfriendly to Liberty provides a new vantage point on the New York City's streets and broadsheets, assemblies, and taverns. Christopher F. Minty challenges shallow stereotypes about revolutionary politics, finally giving a full picture not just of the New York's raucous revolutionaries but also their vigorous opponents.”

Shaking up local and national politics by becoming the first African-American congresswoman and the first black (major party) presidential candidate, Shirley Chisholm left an indelible mark as an "unbought and unbossed" firebrand and a leader in politics. Formed by her early years in Barbados and Brooklyn, her political development and outlook did not follow the standard of the civil rights and feminist establishments. Rather, Anastasia C. Curwood argues in this new biography, she took her own path, making signature contributions as a forerunner of black feminist power—centering black women in a movement that sought to create a broadly democratic force through multicultural, multigenerational, and cross-gender coalition-building. Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics presents a “comprehensive political biography” that moves beyond symbolism, weaving Chisholm's public image with her private experiences to create “a definitive account of a consequential life.”

Brian Purnell, author of Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: the Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn, joins in conversation.

After coming from Germany in 1866, the Morgenthaus established a powerful dynasty in the United States. With unprecedented, exclusive access to family archives, award-winning journalist and biographer Andrew Meier vividly chronicles how they amassed a fortune in Manhattan realty, advised presidents, advanced the New Deal, exposed the Armenian genocide, rescued victims of the Holocaust, waged war in the Mediterranean and Pacific, and, using their foundation of private wealth, became a multi-generational force in local, state, and national government. In the words of former mayor Ed Koch, they were “the closest we’ve got to royalty in New York City.” Hailed as “epic and intimate” (David M. Kennedy), “gripping and illuminating” (Fiona Hill), “a lasting achievement” (Adam Hochschild), and “utterly absorbing” (Gay Talese), Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty captures it all.

Susie J. Pak, author of Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J. P. Morgan, joins in conversation.

New York, the strategic center of the Revolutionary War, was the most important place in North America in 1776. That summer, an unruly rebel army under George Washington repeatedly threatened to burn the city rather than let the British take it. Shortly after the Crown’s forces took New York, much of it burned to the ground. Who set the blaze? In The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution, Benjamin L. Carp delivers the “definitive account of this crucial but forgotten episode” of the war in the first book to fully explore it. Examining why its origins remained a mystery, even after two British investigations, Carp uncovers stories of espionage, terror, chaos, and tragedy in a historical moment we normally associate with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Russell Shorto, prize-winning author of the bestseller Island at the Center of the World and Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom, joins in conversation.

From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, New York served as the largest fish and seafood center in the US, provisioning much of the nation. The enormous size of the city, and, more importantly, New York’s wholesale and retail network, connected fleets of fishermen catching a wide array of species with countless grocers and restaurants. That industry was concentrated around the iconic Fulton Fish Market, where generations of immigrants labored, introduced the rest of the five boroughs to their culinary traditions, and by the 1920s worked under the shadow of organized crime. In The Fulton Fish Market: A History, Jonathan H. Rees explores the market’s workings and significance from its founding in 1822 to its relocation to the Bronx in 2005, telling the stories of the fishermen, retailers, chefs, and others who depended on the Market, and how it shaped the New York and US diet. Examining transformations at the supply-chain end, it also uses this vital distribution point to argue that wholesalers, innovative businessmen who adapted to a dynamic industry, were ultimately overwhelmed by revolutions in transportation and preservation. The book also explains how changes in the urban landscape and economy affected the Market and its surrounding neighborhood, bringing together economic, technological, urban, culinary, and environmental history to show how Fulton Fish Market shaped American cuisine, commerce, and culture.

Megan J. Elias, author of Food in the United States,1890- 1945 and Lunch: A History, joins in conversation.

Captain Kidd was one of the most notorious pirates to ever sail the seas. But few know the behind-the-scenes player who enabled his plundering and helped him outpace his enemies. That accomplice was his wife Sarah, a well-to-do woman whose extraordinary life is a lesson in reinvention and resourcefulness. Twice widowed by twenty-one and operating within the strictures of polite society in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New York, Sarah secretly aided and abetted her husband, fighting off his accusers alongside him.

Marshaling newly discovered sources from archives in London, New York and Boston, historian and journalist Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos reconstructs her life and places it within the city, a “utopia” for pirates in the Golden Age of Piracy. A compelling tale of love, treasure, motherhood and survival, The Pirate's Wife: The Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd weaves together the personal and the epic in a sweeping historical story of romance and adventure.

As World War II ended and Americans turned their attention to problems at home, union leaders and other prominent New Yorkers came to believe that cooperative housing would solve the city’s century-old problem of providing decent housing at a reasonable cost for working-class families. In Working-Class Utopias: A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City, Robert Fogelson, one of the nation’s foremost urban historians, tells the story of this ambitious movement from the construction of the Amalgamated Houses after World War I to the building of Co-op City, the world’s largest housing cooperative, four decades later.

Matthew Lasner, co-editor of Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City, joins in conversation.

In this new book of the same title, Edgardo Meléndez presents the first comprehensive study of the “Puerto Rican problem” in postwar New York City—a notion that began with the arrival of migrants from the US colony in 1945 and developed over the next fifteen years into an intense campaign for policies by the government of Puerto Rico (granted commonwealth status in 1952) and New York to ease their settlement into the city and other regions of the United States. The “problem” served as a foundation for academic concepts like the “culture of poverty,” later embedded into the JFK-LBJ administration’s War on Poverty. It also functioned as the inspiration for icons of American popular culture like Arthur Laurents’s West Side Story, which popularized many of the stereotypes of the day, shaping the way Puerto Ricans were studied and understood for generations. Here, Meléndez, a retired professor of CUNY’s Hunter College and the University of Puerto Rico, explores its roots, development, and consequences.

Virginia E. Sánchez Korrol, author of From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City, joins in conversation with the author.

On a Saturday in New York City in 1912, around the wooden tables of a popular Greenwich Village restaurant, a group of women gathered, all of them convinced that they were going to change the world. It was the first meeting of “Heterodoxy,” a secret social club. Joanna Scutts tells the dazzling story of these Greenwich Village feminists who blazed the trail for the movement’s most radical ideas. Heterodoxy’s members were passionate advocates of free love, equal marriage, and easier divorce. They were socialites and socialists; reformers and revolutionaries; artists, writers, and scientists. Their club, at the heart of America’s bohemia, was a springboard for parties, performances, and radical politics. But it was the women’s extraordinary friendships that made their unconventional lives possible, as they supported each other in pushing for a better world. Hotbed is the “never-before-told story” of the bold women whose audacious ideas and unruly acts transformed a feminist agenda into a modern way of life.

Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, joins in conversation with the author.

The history of New York is scattered across the city, in backyards, construction sites, street beds, and parks, from ancient pottery shards and colonial wine jugs to a child’s shoe in Seneca Village, the neighborhood that used to lay in today’s Central Park: everyday objects serving as windows onto forgotten pasts.

In Buried Beneath the City, Nan A. Rothschild, Amanda Sutphin, H. Arthur Bankoff, and Jessica Striebel MacLean tell the story of New York from the perspective of urban archaeology. Exploring the day-to-day world of an ever-evolving metropolis, they explore both the city’s “deep history” and more recent times, from the earliest traces of human life more than 10,000 years ago to Euro-American colonization and New York’s development into an global capital. Touring archeological finds (which still commonly occur), the book examines the details of everyday life unveiled by these artifacts, which have allowed historians to go beyond the written text, to what lay hidden beneath, for a larger, fuller documentary record. The result is a chronicle of a city that has perpetually torn up its foundations and rebuilt itself, lavishly illustrated with objects excavated from every corner of New York—both an introduction to the field, and the best new archaeological profile of Gotham’s rich past.

Diana Wall, author of the award-winning Unearthing Gotham, the Archaeology of New York City (2001), joins in conversation with Nan A. Rothschild and Amanda Sutphin.

It is often said that eighteen languages were spoken in New Amsterdam. In researching his forthcoming linguistic history of greater New York, Ross Perlin, former Robert D.L. Gardiner fellow at CUNY’s Gotham Center, discovered there may have been many more. He suggests a higher count that includes formerly overlooked languages spoken by the Indigenous population and the free and enslaved people brought here from Asia and Africa. He explores how the new port, New Amsterdam, was Native American, African, and European from the beginning, with the template for the city’s extraordinary multilingualism thus set at the very start of Dutch rule.

Join Ross Perlin, Co-Director of Endangered Language Alliance, for this conversation with Peter-Christian Aigner, Director of the Gotham Center for New York City History.

This is a joint event with The New Amsterdam History Center (NAHC). The program is offered free of charge. Your voluntary contribution will help support NAHC projects and programs such as this one (donations here).

With more than 800 sprawling acres in the middle of America’s densest city, Central Park is an urban masterpiece, a living model to countless successors around the world. But before it gained its shape and name, it was home to New Yorkers of many different backgrounds, the site of farms, businesses, churches, burial grounds, and war. In this new book of the same title, Sara Cedar Miller, historian emerita of the Central Park Conservancy, presents an unofficial but definitive account of the land in modern times. From the first Dutch settlers through the crusade to establish America’s first major urban park, Miller chronicles 250 years of history, telling the stories of indigenous hunters, black slaves and white slaveowners, Patriots and Loyalists, the Afro- and Irish-American landowners and pig farmers of Seneca Village, Catholic sisters, Jewish protesters, and more—tales of political chicanery, real estate speculation, cons, and scams, as well as democratic idealism, immigrant striving, and powerfully human lives. Along the way, she unveils a British fortification and camp built during the Revolution, a suburban retreat from yellow fever epidemics constructed at the turn of the last century, and the properties that a group of free black Americans used to secure the right to vote, showing how much of the history of early America is still etched upon Central Park’s landscape today.

Ken Chaya, the NYC artist, designer, and urban naturalist (creator of Central Park Entire: The Definitive Illustrated Map), joins in conversation with the author.

Located on the grounds of the old Freedomland amusement park in the Bronx, Co-op City’s 35 towers and 236 townhouses have been an icon visible to anyone living nearby or travelling in the corridor for generations. In this new book of the same title, Annemarie H. Sammartino tells the story of those who built it and the hundreds of thousands who called it home. Co-op City was erected in 1965, planned as the largest middle-class housing development in the United States, and meant to solve the problem of affordable housing in America's largest city. While it appeared to be a huge success at first, tensions led residents to organize the largest rent strike in US history. Ten years after its construction, a coalition of shareholders took on the state and, against all odds, obtained control. But even this achievement did not halt rising costs and white flight. Nonetheless, the complex weathered the severe recessions and economic declines of the 1970s and 1980s, a monument to postwar liberal ideals, managing a hard-won stability by the end of the century. Freedomland chronicles those early decades, connecting economic and political history with the history of urban planning and race. The result is a fresh perspective on twentieth-century New York.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries, author of a forthcoming study of the Ebbets Field housing complex in Brooklyn, joins in conversation with the author.