Muhammad Ali in New York, 1967-1970
By Raymond McCaffrey
On a winter day in February 1967, pedestrians gawked as a young African American man walked along Fifth Avenue in New York City: He stood 6 feet, 3 inches tall, aged twenty-five and he was clearly in fighting shape.[1]
“Is that you, Muhammad Ali?’ one woman exclaimed. “You're so handsome."
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The Journalism of Style: How New York’s Fashion Editors Set The Stage For Fashion Reporting
By Kimberly Wilmot Voss
New York City’s deep fashion history created the foundation for the American fashion industry, though often missing from that story is the influence of newspaper fashion editors. Within the first few decades of the 20th century, these editors began to forge important shifts on how the fashion industry was reported on and who got to do that very reporting. For example, in the 1930s, when only fashion magazine reporters and store buyers were permitted in fashion shows, Milwaukee Journal fashion editor Aileen Ryan elbowed her way into New York City shows by simply ignoring the rule.
Read MoreDid All Jews Become White Folks?:
A Fortress in Brooklyn and Hasidic Williamsburg
Reviewed by Gabe S. Tennen
In A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Makings of Hasidic Williamsburg, Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper add an important wrinkle into prevalent understandings of American Jewish history. Deutsch and Casper focus their text on the Hasidic Satmar sect and its creation of a “holy city of Jerusalem” in one corner of north Brooklyn, tracing that community from its nascent beginnings in the 1940s into the 21st century. By offering a detailed and crisply written account of this often discussed but largely underexamined group, the authors provide a caveat to nearly fifty years of scholarship.
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“We Accuse”: The Harlem Rebellion, Bill Epton’s Anti-Carceral Activism, and the rise of the Surveillance State
By Joseph Kaplan
On July 16th, 1964, a mere three weeks after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, off-duty police officer Thomas Gilligan shot and killed fifteen-year-old Black student James Powell outside of Harlem’s Robert Wagner Junior High School. Gilligan claimed that he shot the 5’6” 122-pound Powell in self-defense when the teenager charged him with a knife, a claim disputed by several of Powell’s classmates. While the events of that day remain contested, there is firm agreement that this was the spark for the first major urban rebellion of the 1960s.
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“Completion by Contrast”: Architecture and Sculpture in Postwar New York
By Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins
In the March 30, 1963 issue of the New Yorker, art critic and historian Calvin Tomkins profiled sculptor Richard Lippold, whom he described as “by all odds, the busiest artist now working predominantly in collaboration with architects.”
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