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Posts in Contemporary Era
Margaret M. Power, Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-imperialism

Solidarity Across the Americas: The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and Anti-Imperialism

Review By Edgardo Meléndez

For Power, Puerto Rico’s colonial status greatly undermines the honesty of America’s “Good Neighbor” policy towards Latin American countries in the 1930s. She recounts the PRNP’s continued efforts to obtain support for its cause into the 1940s and argues that it was crucial in getting important sectors in several Latin American countries to challenge US policy towards the region.

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Streets in Play: The Playstreets Photographs of Katrina Thomas

Streets in Play: The Playstreets Photography of Katrina Thomas

By Rebekah Burgess and Mariana Mogilevich

Photographs of recreation programs like this one were commissioned to offer visual proof that, after four summers of nation-wide protest and violence, starting in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1964, the city was compensating for a long-term lack of investment in low-income, racially segregated neighborhoods…. A few of Thomas’ images were utilized for official purposes, reproduced in pamphlets to attract or to thank program sponsors, but her exceptional eye transcended the municipal task. Her lens recorded the city's sponsored activities as well as the more candid action at the edge of the frame. These captivating, impromptu images provide a rare perspective on a distressed urban landscape, privileging a child’s-eye view of the possibilities for play and delight.

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Boy With The Bullhorn by Ron Goldberg

Boy with the Bullhorn: A Memoir and History of ACT UP New York

Review by Rachel Pitkin

In six parts, Ron Goldberg’s Boy with the Bullhorn: A Memoir and History of ACT UP guides readers through what can often seem like a dizzying terrain of AIDS-related political networks, medical jargon, and direct-action campaigns. The tour is intimate and strikingly honest. Goldberg, a self-described unsuspecting activist, charts his growth from an aspiring theater actor to core ACT UP member and finally—with the publication of The Boy with the Bullhorn—to a “witness.”

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Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics by Anastasia C. Curwood

Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics

Review by Michael Woodsworth

Chisholm entered Congress as a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, a staunch defender of the Great Society, an advocate of expanded welfare benefits, and an unapologetic feminist. Despite her reputation as a “fiery idealist,” Curwood argues, she was also “ruthlessly pragmatic.” Chisholm was a coalition builder: she helped to found the Congressional Black Caucus as well as the National Women’s Political Caucus…. The 1972 presidential primary run remains Chisholm’s signature moment.… Chisholm may have been a transformational figure, but, as Curwood shows, she was also a product of her times. Her rise, accomplishments, and setbacks match, almost too perfectly, the arc of 20th-century American liberalism.

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The Battle Nearer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City

The Battle Nearer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City

Review by Erika Kitzmiller

Despite its global reputation as a proudly diverse and progressive city, New York City public schools remain deeply segregated and inequitable. Bonastia covers two periods in which officials considered and local residents pushed for integration: from Brown v. Board (1954) to the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s and then from the early 2010s to the present. He asserts that he chose these two periods because they were the only times in recent history when there was any hope of enacting and implementing policies and programs to advance integration and equity.

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Making Book on the Rez: A Hundred Years of Watershed Inquietude

Making Book on the Rez: A Hundred Years of Watershed Inquietude

Review by Gerard Koeppel

Lucy Sante’s Nineteen Reservoirs is an odd little book. “I would like simply to give an account of the human costs,” she concludes the Introduction, “an overview of the trade-offs, a summary of unintended consequences.”…Readers uninitiated in the history of New York’s water supply and watershed-dweller psychosis will find a useful if derivative primer.

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A Seat at the Table: LGBTQ Representation in New York Politics

A Seat at the Table: LGBTQ Representation in New York Politics, Exhibit at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives

Reviewed by Danica Stompor

The beating heart of Gourjon-Bieltvedt and Petrus’s exhibit is turning these testimonies into a fervent call to young people for optimism and for action…It has been far from a linear path, but for many people my age and younger, the past decades have featured an enormous increase in visibility and significant legal wins for queer people, particularly in New York. A Seat at the Table inserts us into the lives and tactics of the city’s elected officials who made these gains possible while resisting the attitude that progress is inevitable…A Seat at the Table is attuned to the small moments that transform residents into leaders.

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Placemaker and Displacer: How Transit Shaped New York

Placemaker and Displacer: How Transit Shaped New York

By Polly Desjarlais

Before 1950, a vibrant multi-ethnic, residential neighborhood known as Little Syria existed at the very bottom of Manhattan. A concentration of immigrants from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine (countries collectively known then as Greater Syria) settled on Lower Washington Street beginning in the 1880s… As in the case of Chinatown, the transit connections between Little Syria and Brooklyn became instrumental in the community’s transplantation and survival… nearly the whole neighborhood was razed in the 1940s to make way for the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (Hugh L. Carey Tunnel). . . In the case of Little Syria, the city’s transportation demands both displaced people and provided a means of resettlement in other parts of the city.

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We Won’t Move!: An Interview with Maggie Schreiner

We Won’t Move! An Interview with Maggie Schreiner

Maggie Schreiner, interviewed by Katie Uva

Right now, New York City is attempting to recover from the pandemic, more populous than ever before, and facing exorbitant housing costs. It seems… both booming and in crisis at the same time,… What are some ways the history featured in We Won’t Move! should inform our understanding of housing in New York in the present?

The tenant protections and affordable housing programs which we have today are primarily the result of grassroots organizing and advocacy. While the power of real estate capital can seem overwhelming, We Won’t Move aims to demonstrate the political power of tenants, and to offer an understanding of NYC’s rich history of tenant organizing as an inspiration and strategic tool.

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Haitian Refugees, ACT UP New York, and the Transnational Dimensions of Local Organizing for AIDS Housing

Haitian Refugees, ACT UP New York, and the Transnational Dimensions of Local Organizing for AIDS Housing

 By Maggie Schreiner

…as small numbers of people started being released from Guantánamo under interim orders; the lawyers didn’t know how to arrange for supportive housing. A group in New Jersey had housed the first few people who had been freed, but as a plane carrying an HIV-positive Haitian child and his grandmother approached Newark Airport, the organization backed out of the arrangement. Unless alternate housing could be found immediately, the two would be returned to Guantánamo…

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