New Collections From the CUNY Digital History Archive
By Stephen Brier
The CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA), created in 2013 by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center, is committed to preserving and presenting on an open publicly accessible website the history of the City University of New York. Over the past eight years, a number of CUNY faculty, staff, graduate students, and alumni have created a series of curated collections of primary historical sources materials on key moments in CUNY’s rich history.
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.
“Are these not my streets?”: May Swenson, New York City, and the Federal Writers Project
By Margaret A. Brucia
Drawn to New York by her exposure to Lost Generation authors and the work of Alfred Stieglitz and his circle of artists, May Swenson left the security of her loving Mormon family in Utah during the depths of the Great Depression. After struggling to hold a series of low-paying positions, withering prospects for employment threatened her continued existence in New York. By a devious route, May joined the ranks of the Federal Writers Project, plunged into New York’s cauldron of creativity and went on to become a leader in the field of modern poetry.
“Loose Hogs, Fancy Dogs, and Mounds of Manure in the Streets of Manhattan”: An Interview with Catherine McNeur
Interviewed by Amanda Martin-Hardin, Maddy Aubey, and Prem Thakker of the Everyday Environmentalism Podcast
Today on the blog, CatherineMcNeur discusses how during the early 19th century, working class New Yorkers living in Manhattan raised livestock and even practiced a form of recycling by reusing urban waste. Battles over urbanizing and beautifying New York City ensued, involving fights over sanitation and animals in the streets; and how to manage recurring epidemics and diseases like cholera that ravaged the city. McNeur explains how these tensions exacerbated early forms of gentrification in the 19th century, and contemplates how we can learn from the past to create more equitable urban green spaces and shared environmental resources in the future.
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.
In Radical Imagination, Radical Humanity: Puerto Rican Political Activism in New York, Rose Muzio analyzes how structural and historical factors — including colonialism, economic marginalization, racial discrimination, and the Black and Brown Power movements of the 1960s — influenced young Puerto Ricans to reject mainstream ideas about political incorporation and join others in struggles against perceived injustices. This analysis provides the first in-depth account of the origins, evolution, achievements, and failures of El Comité-Movimiento de Izquierda Nacional Puertorriqueño, one of the main organizations of the Puerto Rican Left in the 1970s in New York City.
“Young people are making their voices heard”: From Harlem’s Youth Movement in the 1930s and 1940s to DSA-NYC
By Mary Reynolds
The ongoing press scrum over New York’s 2021 mayoral election has obscured the down-ticket candidates in the June 22 primary races for the City’s fifty-one Council seats. These contests could be better bellwethers for the city’s future, and recall a little-known era of the city’s radical past.
In the twelve months before January 2021, 2,225 people were buried on Hart Island, New York City’s public burial ground. At a time when the Island’s operations are undergoing the most significant organizational changes in its modern history, that’s the highest number of such burials recorded since the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic.
Today on the blog, Gotham editor Willie Mack speaks to filmmaker and geographer Brett Story about her book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America. Story reexamines the prison as a set of social relations which includes property, race, gender, and class across the urban landscape. In this way, Story demonstrates how carceral power is distributed outside of the prisons walls to include racially segregated communities, gentrifying urban spaces, and even mass transit.
