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.
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.
Henry H. Sapoznik: The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City
Interviewed by Rob Snyder
The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City offers a new look at over a century of New York's history of Yiddish popular culture. Henry H. Sapoznik — a Peabody Award-winning coproducer of NPR's Yiddish Radio Project — tells the story in over a baker's dozen chapters on theater, music, architecture, crime, Blacks and Jews, restaurants, real estate, and journalism.
Hopper’s second work depicting the island, Blackwell’s Island (1928), is stark and unsettling, related mostly in title to the 1911 piece. […] The river, a bright cerulean blue, occupies the bottom half of the canvas, and the top half consists of pale blue sky and odd clouds receding into the distance. All of the infamous institutions on the island are there, but by now had almost ceased operating. Hopper paints them as flattened, simplified, and lit brilliantly by the sun. Like most of his works, there is something slightly off about the scene — it is too quiet, too placid. Though the buildings are banal, Hopper suggests that there is something ominous that occurred within their walls.
Pass through any of Central Park's twenty original entrances today (Figure 1), and you're walking through spaces defined more by absence than presence. These "gates" are really just gaps in the perimeter wall, full of intention never realized — invisible stories of artistic talent, social connection, and personal ambition in antebellum New York. Like the carefully framed views created by Central Park’s designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, they offer at its threshold a glimpse into unseen forces that shaped America's first great public space.
Melting Metropolis: An Interview with Daniel Cumming and Kara Murphy Schlichting
Interviewed By Rachel Pitkin
Public archives help create a record that highlights, or at least can suggest, the varied experiences of summer heat, even if one must learn to “read” the images with a critical eye. And while the archive itself is inherently selective — not everyone can or will upload their images of summer, of course — visual records that cross all five boroughs and span multiple generations reveal a rich tapestry of New York City life over many summer seasons.
Operation Sail 1976: How New York City Came Together in a Time of Crisis
By Angelina Lambros
The On July 4, 1976, New York City celebrated the Bicentennial of American independence with a parade of ships that began at the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and moved up the Hudson River. Officially titled “Operation Sail,” more than 200 ships gathered for the event. With more than six million spectators, it became the largest crowd in New York City’s history. For America's largest city where people regularly turned out for special events, Operation Sail proved truly exceptional.
Reel Freedom: Black Film Culture in Early Twentieth Century New York City
Review By Deena Ecker
Reel Freedom challenges the reader to think beyond the Harlem Renaissance and place film, an important piece of leisure in the 1920s and ‘30s, at the center of the Black cultural and intellectual transformation in New York and the nation. While much of the book focuses on the theaters in Harlem, Lopez reminds us that in the first decade of the 20th century, there were pockets of Black life all over the city. The ways that Black moviegoers, critics, projectionists, and producers engaged with film demonstrated a claim to physical, intellectual, and cultural space in early-twentieth-century New York. In real and significant ways, these claims to space were part of the larger Black struggle for equality.
The 1960s brought sweeping changes throughout America, and this included changes to women’s education. The Civil Rights Movement provoked a reassessment of the role of women in society. Many universities were reaching the conclusion that they could not, and should not, remain the restricted domains of male education. […] When Hunter College and Marymount Manhattan College became coeducational, Finch found itself competing with Barnard for the women-only market in the city.
From 1949 until his death in 1997, Murray Kempton was a distinct presence in New York City journalism. Peddling around town on a three-speed bicycle wearing a three-piece suit, he wrote about everything from politics to jazz to the Mafia. His writing was eloquent, his perspective unique, and his moral judgements driven by a profound sympathy for losers, dissenters and underdogs. […] Going Around: Selected Journalism / Murray Kempton (Seven Stories Press, 2025), edited by Andrew Holter, brings Kempton’s work to old admirers and a new generation of readers.
