"Vision From An Ashcan": A Radical Exploration of New Subjects

By Robert A. Slayton

The Ashcan school represented a challenge to its era. In a fundamental reinterpretation of art’s appropriate subject matter, it threw down a gauntlet, of canvas and paint, to the art world both of the right and of the left. It did not see the city through the narrow peephole of the elites, instead introducing new landscapes, new characters. But these perspectives were also different from what the reformers saw. This new approach painted the rest of the city, with beauty, endowing urban and working-class individuals of all ages and genders with agency and will. In so doing, the Ashcan artists created one of the great American art forms.

Arts & Culture, Excerpts, Progressive EraGuest UserAugust 2, 2018Comment

"Out of ashes comes beauty": An interview with Jeffrey C. Stewart

Today on Gotham, Peter-Christian Aigner speaks with Jeffrey C. Stewart about his new book, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, the most comprehensive biography on the "father of the Harlem Renaissance."

Arts & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Interviews, Progressive Era, Gilded Age, Race & EthnicityGuest UserJuly 17, 2018Comment

Women after Suffrage: An Interview with Elisabeth Israels Perry

Today on the blog, editor Katie Uva sits down with Elisabeth Israels Perry to talk about her research process and her insights as she prepares her new book, After the Vote: Feminist Politics in La Guardia's New York (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2019).

Gender & Sexuality, Interviews, Politics, Progressive Era, Great Depression & New DealGuest UserJuly 10, 2018Comment

Amy Werbel's Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock

Reviewed by Marcela Micucci

Anthony Comstock was a household name in nineteenth-century America, so much so that his last name became synonymous with a movement and set of laws that sought to censor obscenity and eradicate vice. Historian Amy Werbel explores this anti-obscenity movement — and its champion — in her provocative and cutting-edge work, Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (2018).

Gender & Sexuality, Gilded Age, Politics, Progressive Era, ReviewsGuest UserJune 19, 2018Anthony ComstockComment

"To harness the forces of nature to the service of mankind”: An interview with Richard Munson

Today on Gotham, Peter-Christian Aigner speaks with Richard Munson, director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s clean-energy efforts in the Midwest and the author of several books, about his new work, Tesla: Inventor of the Modern.

Interviews, Progressive Era, ScienceGuest UserJune 14, 2018Comment

Where Suffrage Took Flight: Staten Island and the Woman Suffrage Movement

By Gabriella Leone

On May 20, 1913, nationally renowned suffragist, Rosalie Gardiner Jones, made a spectacular debut in Staten Island, where she became the first suffrage activist to fly for the cause. To achieve this feat, she met her pilot Harry Bingham Brown, one of Staten Island’s resident pilots, at the Grant City train station and boarded his plane. The New York Times reported, “Gen. Rosalie did not show a sign of fear as she took her seat in the biplane, seized a steel rod, the only thing to hold to, with her left hand, had her skirts tied down with a little piece of blue string, and, with a bunch of leaflets in her right hand, nodded a smiling good-bye to the crowd below.” Decorated with 'Votes for Women' banners, the plane arrived at its destination, roughly two miles away on the island’s eastern shore, in fifteen minutes. It landed at the Flying Carnival of the Staten Island Aeronautical Society in a flurry of yellow leaflets, which Jones had been scattering along the way.

Gender & Sexuality, Politics, Progressive Era, Staten IslandGuest UserMay 3, 2018Comment

Eddy Portnoy's Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange But True Stories From the Yiddish Press

Reviewed by Tamar Rabinowitz

In April of last year, a play about a play became a surprise Broadway hit. The Pulitzer Prize winning Indecent recounted the making of renowned Yiddish playwright, Shalom Asch’s 1906 God of Vengeance — a story of a wealthy, exploitative, and violent Jewish brothel owner eager to marry off his daughter to a respectable scholar. A tale about faith, hypocrisy, sexuality, and deceit, God of Vengeance unearthed the unsavory aspects of Eastern European Jewish life, leaving contemporaries to wonder if it “was good for the Jews?”

Progressive Era, Race & Ethnicity, Religion, ReviewsGuest UserApril 17, 2018Comment

A Vital Force: Immigrant Garment Workers and Suffrage

By Karen Pastorello

At a New York City suffrage parade in the fall of 1912, Wage Earner’s Suffrage League vice-president Leonora O’Reilly led a delegation of working women toward Union Square toting a sign that read “We Want the Vote for Fire Protection.” Other women marching held signs depicting the “Asch Building Fire” that had ripped through the Triangle Shirtwaist Company the previous year.[1] The industrial tragedy shook the city and exposed the plight of urban immigrant workers to the rest of the world for the first time in history. For activists already engaged in working to better the lives of industrial workers, women labor activists’ reaction to the tragedy directly linked the possibility of improving working women’s lives to the vote. Women in the United States felt powerless in the workplace and the broader world around them. They did not have the right to influence legislation that would affect their daily lives. They did not have the right to vote. Suffrage would give working-class women another weapon to fight against the harsh conditions of their labor.

Business & Labor, Gender & Sexuality, Politics, Progressive EraGuest UserApril 10, 2018Comment

Al Smith's Revolution: An interview with Robert Chiles

Today on Gotham, managing editor Peter-Christian Aigner speaks with Robert Chiles, author of the new book The Revolution of '28 (released today!), about the long-debated question of whether Al Smith — the beloved representative of Manhattan's nationally symbolic (immigrant and working-class) Lower East Side — set in motion the New Deal "realignment" with his 1928 presidential race.

Interviews, Politics, Progressive Era, Great Depression & New DealGuest UserMarch 22, 2018Comment

Schools in Department Stores?: Continuation Schools and Department Store Employees

By Sandra Roff

“Mr. Selfridge” and “The Paradise” are two recent PBS series that dramatize working in the new department stores established in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Across the Atlantic, department stores were similarly enjoying success with stores opening and expanding to meet the demands of consumers. However, it was not just the sale of material goods to consumers that took place in these stores, but also activities that seemed to benefit employees. Forward-thinking employers believed they had a responsibility to provide for the welfare of their employees, whether it was for medical care, recreation, or even schooling: a movement known as Industrial Paternalism.

Business & Labor, Education, Progressive EraGuest UserMarch 6, 2018Comment