Crisis, Disease, Shortage, and Strike: Shipbuilding on Staten Island in World War I
By Faith D’Alessandro
On April 6th 1917 the United States officially joined the First World War. The casus belli was the sinking of three US ships by German U-boats on March 18th. However, the U-boat issue and its devastating consequences had been under way for far longer, and would fuel a shipping crisis throughout the remainder of the war. In February 1917 U-boats had sunk almost 540,000 gross tons of shipping, and in March another 600,000, creating an enormous need to increase merchant ship construction. The urgency of mobilization and defense affected ship manufacturing centers across the country, including the huge shipbuilding industry in New York Harbor, which was centered around three major areas: Greenpoint, Brooklyn, including the Brooklyn Navy Yard; the Camden-Bayonne area of New Jersey; and the North Shore of Staten Island.
In the late summer of 1883, the Dakota Apartments was nearly ready for tenants. After three years of construction, the luxury apartment building had only a few months’ work left to go. Slate-tile roofers, sheet-metal workers, and ironworkers were completing the roof, while carpenters, plasterers, and plumbers finished the interiors. Every day, hundreds of craftsmen trekked uptown to work on the million-dollar building that was not only unusually expensive but also remote in location.
The Bank of United States, East European Jews and the Lost World of Immigrant Banking
By Rebecca A. Kobrin
On a particularly cold morning ninety-one years ago this month, the owner of a small candy store in the Bronx went to his branch of the Bank of United States to withdraw some much-needed cash. Over the past two years, the bank had been selling its shares to its depositors throughout New York city to help raise funds, guaranteeing their investment would maintain its value. The Bank promised it would buy back shares at any point. Now, this storeowner was taking them up on it.
Decline, Rebellion, and Police Politics: Rethinking the Dissolution of New York’s Civil Rights Coalition
Reviewed by Joseph Kaplan
In his final book before his life was taken by an assassin’s bullet, Martin Luther King Jr. reflected on the state of the Civil Rights Movement and the conditional allyship of whites. According to King, whites generally believed “that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony.” Emerging from a decade of unprecedented mobility in which a highly unionized white labor force entered the middle class en masse, many viewed the Civil Rights Movement as part of the unbroken march of progress.
“People Love the Rat”: How Scabby, Labor’s Mascot, Took New York
By Benjamin Serby
Anyone who has spent time in New York will not be surprised to learn that it is the most rat-infested city in the United States, with an estimated population of two million (roughly one rat for every four people). Strangely, rats are part of the city’s culture — and long have been. As Luc Sante explains in Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, rat-baiting was the city’s “premier betting sport” in the 19th century. Boys were paid to collect rats from the street “at a rate of five to twelve cents a head,” and spectators wagered on how quickly fox terriers or “men wearing heavy boots” could massacre dozens of them at a time.
The Chinese Lady: An Interview with Nancy E. Davis
Interviewed by Hongdeng Gao
Today on the blog, editor Hongdeng Gao speaks to Nancy E. Davis about her recent book, The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America. Through creative use of disparate sources from many years of research, Davis captures the experiences of Afong Moy — the first recognized Chinese woman to arrive in America — as she introduced exotic goods from the East, as well as Chinese life, to the American public. The book provides rich insights into how Afong Moy’s presence changed Americans’ views of China and influenced American popular and material culture. It also sheds light on New York City’s role in the early US-China trade and the rise of the global marketplace.
In the political ferment of early 20th century New York City, when socialists and reformers battled sweatshops, and writers and artists thought a new world was being born, an immigrant Jewish woman from Russia appeared in the Yiddish press, in Carnegie Hall, and at rallies. Her name was Rose Pastor Stokes, and she fought for socialism, contraception and workers’ rights.
Though post-COVID statistics will reflect restaurant closures, downsizing, or “ghost kitchens,” as of the summer of 2020 there were 27,556 restaurants operating in New York City, 977 of which were Mexican. To some, this latter number might not be surprising (and even seem low given the popularity of Mexican cuisine). Yet just a few decades ago, New York was a place where Mexican food was hard to find. It lagged behind other cities like Chicago, San Antonio, or Los Angeles that claimed larger Mexican-origin populations and a longer history of Mexican restaurants.
“Working-Class New York Revisited” Conference Honors Joshua Freeman
By Marc Kagan
“I do hope that this book illuminates the possibilities for ordinary people to play a greater role in shaping their city and nation than they do today.” Joshua Freeman, Working-Class New York, 2000. New York City’s working-class had real political, economic, and social power for almost thirty years after World War II. That power, expressed primarily through private- and, increasingly, public-sector unions, made life substantially better not just for their own members, but millions of other working-class New Yorkers.
Contiguous Cloth: Textiles and the Slave Trade in New Netherland
By Carrie Anderson
Sometime in the fall of 1661 the Nieuw Nederlantse Indiaen docked in the harbor of New Amsterdam carrying documents and cargo from Curaçao, the Dutch colony that served as a central hub of the slave trade for both Dutch and Spanish colonies in the Americas. The skipper of the ship, Dirck Jansz van Oldenburg, carried with him a list of documents that were to be delivered to Pieter Stuyvesant (1612-1672), the director-general of New Netherland between 1647 and 1664.
