Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History
View our complete bibliography (800+ articles) here
Categories
- American Revolution
- Animals
- Antebellum & Civil War
- Arts & Culture
- British Era
- Bronx
- Brooklyn
- Built Environment
- Business & Labor
- Contemporary Era
- Crime & Policing
- Early Republic
- Education
- Excerpts
- Food & Drink
- Gender & Sexuality
- Gilded Age
- Great Depression & New Deal
- Housing & Realty
- Immigration
- Interviews
- Lenape
- Manhattan
- Media
- Medicine & Public Health
- Metropolitan Region
- Native Americans
- Nature & Environment
- New Amsterdam
- Parks
- Podcasts
- Politics
- Postwar New York
- Poverty & Inequality
- Progressive Era
- Queens
- Race & Ethnicity
- Religion
- Reviews
- Science
- Slavery & Antislavery
- Staten Island
- Transportation
- Urban Decline & Fiscal Crisis
- Urban Planning
- Waterfront & Islands
- Women
Gotham is a blog for independent and professional scholars of New York City history
We invite submissions and feedback
Meet our editorial team | See our past contributors
Distribution Partners
Thinking Black, Collecting Black: Schomburg’s Desiderata and the Radical World of Black Bibliophiles
By Laura E. Helton
In this circle, Schomburg also explored the concept of collectivity, engaging in a method he and Bruce each called the practice of “thinking black.” Subverting the narrow, stifling ways that the United States codified racial segregation, this method looked elsewhere—in both time and space—to harness the power of “thinking black” in diasporic and global terms. Schomburg saw the stakes of his project as at once mapping the contours of an explicitly Black modernity—embodied in objects like the earliest books printed in Africa, paintings by Black Renaissance artists, or the proceedings of free Black institutions in the Americas—and rethinking the writing of history more broadly.