Today on Gotham, editor Nick Juravich sits down with historian Elisabeth Engel, to speak about her experience writing her first book, Encountering Empire, on the lives of African American Missionaries in colonial Africa during the early twentieth century, and her thoughts on the subject since the monograph was published.
Read MoreIn Encountering Empire, historian Elisabeth Engel traces how black American missionaries — men and women grappling with their African heritage — established connections in Africa during the heyday of European colonialism. Reconstructing the black American “colonial encounter,” a neglected chapter of Atlantic history, Engel analyzes the images, transatlantic relationships, and possibilities of representation African American missionaries developed for themselves while negotiating colonial regimes. Between 1900 and 1939, these missionaries paved the way for the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the oldest independent black American institution, to establish a presence in Britain's sub-Saharan colonies. African Americans thus used imperial structures for their own self-determination.
This post, drawn from the book's fourth chapter, discusses how concepts of home crystallized a counterculture of diasporic pan-Africanism within AME missionary circles. A key part of defining “home” for these missionaries was moving to a new headquarters in Harlem.
Read MoreLast week, in advance of Chanukah, we published a review of Jewish New York, the new digest from NYU Press based on their acclaimed multi-volume series, City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York.
Today, just a few days before Christmas, we hear from journalist and writer Alex Palmer about how an early twentieth century New Yorker (his great grand-uncle) invented the popular, contemporary American fixtures of the Christian holiday. Gotham 's interview with the bestselling author of The Santa Claus Man follows.
Read MoreOn June 16, 1915, Julia Gardiner Gayley dined with her friend Elizabeth Lovett at Lucy Frelinghuysen’s summer house on Mt. Desert Island in Maine. Less than six weeks earlier, a German U-boat had torpedoed the Lusitania, a British luxury liner, off the southern coast of Ireland, killing nearly 1,200 people, including 128 Americans. President Woodrow Wilson, two years into his first term, clashed with his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, over how America, clinging to neutrality, should deal with Germany in the aftermath of the disaster. Bryan, a pacifist, refused to back the strict demands Wilson imposed on the Germans. A week before Julie’s evening at Lucy’s, Bryan resigned from office in protest, weakening Wilson’s bargaining position during an international crisis. Bryan’s action not only fractured the Democratic Party, but sowed further doubts among pro-intervention Republicans, like Julie, about the Democrats’ ability to lead an America threatened by war.
This is the latest in a series of posts based on the letters of the New York socialite, Julia Gardiner Gayley (1864-1937), to her eldest daughter, Mary Gayley Senni (1884-1971), a countess who lived on the outskirts of Rome. In 2010, the author purchased a trove of the letters in a Roman flea market. This mother-daughter correspondence spanned the years 1902-1936 and provides an intimate and unfiltered view of life in New York during the early twentieth century.
Read MoreNovember 6th marked 100 years of women’s suffrage in New York. While celebrations of the landmark event have echoed across the state this past year, perhaps the greatest commemoration to the centennial year has been historians’ reignited interest in New York suffragists and their struggle to win the vote. Leading the charge in this cadre of works are Johanna Neuman’s Gilded Suffragists and Susan Goodier and Karen Pastorello’s Women Will Vote.
