In her new book, the former curator and independent historian Bonnie Yochelson provides a long-overdue biography of Alice Austen, the first in half a century. Copiously illustrated, Too Good to Get Married, also provides a much-needed study of the photographer’s enormous and pioneering body of work.

Austen grew up in Staten Island during the late 1800s, a Gilded Age socialite devoted to what she called “the larky life” (tennis matches, yacht races, lavish parties). But early on she committed herself to the new art of photography, instead of following the usual path to marriage. Austen also used her camera to satirize gender norms, embracing the rebellious spirit of the “New Woman.” She had romantic affairs with women, too, and at thirty-one met Gertrude Tate, who became her life partner. Rejecting the pursuit of a career over the taint of commerce, she remained an amateur photographer, within the confines of elite society. But she left behind a large, intriguing legacy. Yochelson fills the need for a fresh and deeply researched look at this skillful, witty artist, whose life illuminates the history of American photography and sexuality.

Nick Yablon, Professor of History and American studies at the University of Iowa, joins in conversation.

In The Menace of Prosperity, Daniel Wortel-London argues that cities are made and unmade by “fiscal imagination.” Convinced that local government depends on attracting wealthy firms and residents, municipal governments have lavished subsidies on their behalf, from tax-exempt apartments and corporate incentives to debt-financed mega projects. But this wasn’t always the case. Wortel-London’s survey of New York City from the 1870s and the 1970s reveals how many imagined alternate routes to urban development. From cooperatives and public housing to land-value taxation and public utilities, they sought paths beyond trickle-down, redistributive liberalism. Often depicting fiscal crises as the result of the greed and waste of the rich, strategy centered on making local economies prosperous and just for the normal everyday resident. Overturning stale axioms, this ambitious new book challenges stale axioms, demonstrates the range of alternatives we’ve abandoned, and hints at the more democratic cities that might result.

Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and Professor Emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University, joins in conversation.

The history of terrorism in New York does not begin with September 11th or the first World Trade Center bombing. What is known as terrorism — symbolic political violence — has been at the center of life in Gotham for a very long time. And during the “long 1960s” (the mid 1960s to mid 1970s), the city experienced a wave of terrorism that was unprecedented in many ways. Never before, and never since, have so many actors engaged in this act.

Scholarship on this period has largely focused on New Left radicals such as the Weather Underground. But in his new book, You Have Unleashed a Storm, David Viola finds that terrorism was just as likely to emanate from the right, and may have in fact originated there.

Terrorism and the response to it – most notably by the NYPD and the FBI – also coevolved. Actions prompted more aggressive investigations, which in turn drove actors further. Building on these “intelligence” operations, authorities brought to bear many of the practices that would soon land them in legal trouble during the Church Committee investigation and the “Handschu” case.

Ultimately, this history is both longer and more diverse than is commonly understood, even in scholarly history, and New York City lied at the center. Using new archival collections and declassified files, as well as preserved court records, Viola — an intelligence officer in the US Navy Reserves and Adjunct Professor at the Center on Terrorism at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice — offers a groundbreaking, illuminating account of this subject and era.

In popular imagination, the suburbs represent the “American Dream.” After World War II, families rushed into these new areas, building wealth through homeownership while enjoying superior public schools. But in this revelatory new account, Michael R. Glass exposes this prosperity as mythical, focusing on the archetype of Long Island. Cracked Foundations uncovers a hidden landscape of debt and speculation.

Glass shows how suburbanites were not guaranteed decent housing and high-quality education but instead had to obtain these necessities in the marketplace using mortgages and bonds. These debt instruments created financial strains, distributed resources unevenly, and codified segregation. Most important, they made housing and education commodities, turning homes and schools into engines of capital accumulation. The resulting pressures made life increasingly precarious, even for those privileged suburbanites who resided in all-white communities. For people of color denied the same privileges, suburbs became places where predatory loans extracted wealth and credit rating agencies punished children in the poorest school districts. Long Islanders challenged these inequalities over several decades, demanding affordable housing, school desegregation, tax equity, and school-funding equalization. Yet the unequal circumstances created by the mortgages and bonds remain very much in place, even today.

Susis J. Pak, Associate Professor of History at St. John's University, joins in conversation.

Once wetlands, Queens today is a crowded cityscape of dense urban neighborhoods and suburban sprawl. The largest of New York City’s five boroughs by area, it has a larger population than every American city except Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City itself. It possesses the most culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse population in the United States and possibly the world. This is the story of Queens, “the world’s borough,” and how it transformed, in less than one hundred years, from an agricultural hinterland to a vital urban corridor.
 
Rural County, Urban Borough is a history of place, charting the rapid transformation of the Queens landscape. It identifies what drove the borough’s development, from public infrastructure, architecture, and transportation to technological innovation and urban planning. The late historian Jeffrey A. Kroessler takes us inside the backrooms and boardrooms where local powerbrokers shaped the borough’s future, chronicling how its relationship with the city has evolved. He also shows the steps Queens residents from all backgrounds took to care for their neighborhoods and build their communities. Richly illustrated, this book underscores why Queens is integral to New York City and the wider world and reveals how, in its evolution, we see the whole arc of American urban history.

In the early 1990s, murder rates in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York climbed to the highest in the city’s history. How did this once thriving, diverse, family enclave fall into such ruin? In this groundbreaking work of investigative journalism, Stacy Horn finds the answer in the subprime mortgage scandal of the 1970s. In response to redlining and discriminatory housing practices, Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration passed the Housing and Urban Development Act, ostensibly meant to help low-income families of color achieve homeownership. But they could never have predicted how banks, lenders, realtors, and corrupt FHA officials themselves would use the newly passed law to make victims of the very people they were supposed to help, and the devastation they would leave in their wake. The Killing Fields of East New York reveals how white-collar crime reduced a prospering neighborhood to abandoned buildings and empty lots, weaving a narrative of government failure with the downfall of a community and the largest series of mortgage fraud prosecutions in US history.