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Posts in Race & Ethnicity
Interview: Andrea Mosterman on her book, Spaces of Enslavement

Interview: Andrea Mosterman on her book, Spaces of Enslavement

Interviewed by Deborah Hamer

In her new book, Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York, Dr. Andrea Mosterman looks at the lives of enslaved people in New Netherland and Colonial New York from the 1620s until 1820. She shows how central enslaved labor was to individual households and to the colony as a whole and how this dependence on enslaved people shaped life for all New Yorkers — Black and white — over this two hundred year period.

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Podcast Interview: Larry Kirwan's Rockaway Blue

Podcast Interview: Rockaway Blue

Larry Kirwan interviewed by Robert W. Snyder

Twenty years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the novel Rockaway Blue (Cornell UP, 2021) probes the griefs, trauma and resilience of Irish American New Yorkers wresting with the deaths and aftershocks of that terrible day. The book weaves throughout New York City, from the Midtown North precinct in Manhattan to Arab American Brooklyn, but it is so grounded in the Irish section of Rockaway in the borough of Queens that Rockaway itself becomes a kind of character.

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Did All Jews Become White Folks?: A Fortress in Brooklyn and Hasidic Williamsburg

Did 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 

“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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The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War

The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War

Van Gosse interviewed by Jessica Georges

It may be difficult to imagine that a consequential black electoral politics evolved in the United States before the Civil War, for as of 1860, the overwhelming majority of African Americans remained in bondage. Yet free black men, many of them escaped slaves, steadily increased their influence in electoral politics over the course of the early American republic. Despite efforts to disfranchise them, black men voted across much of the North, sometimes in numbers sufficient to swing elections.

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Pioneras Boricua

Pioneras Boricuas

By Cathy Cabrera-Figueroa

Puerto Ricans who migrated to the United States in the early 20th century were not the first to do so. Trade and commerce linked Puerto Rico and the United States before the 19th century and movement between the two has continued since then. Piecing together the migration stories of Puerto Rican women who came to New York City after the Great War is quite challenging. These women were regular people, and until the 1960s and 1970s, there was little incentive to collect or archive their experiences.

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The History of Gambling and the Future of Marijuana

The History of Gambling and the Future of Marijuana

By Matthew Vaz

With recreational marijuana crossing over to legalization in New York State, there is authentic optimism that the new system of regulation will be of benefit to the communities that have long been targeted by discriminatory policing. While these developments are encouraging, New York’s history with transforming illicit activity into budgetary salvation gives reason for caution. The largest endeavor of this kind was the tortured legalization of numbers gambling by the New York State Lottery, a historical process which featured many of the same themes of race, exclusion, and budget crisis.

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Patria: Puerto Rican Revolutionaries in Nineteenth Century New York

Podcast Interview: Patria: Puerto Rican Revolutionaries in Nineteenth Century New York

Edgardo Meléndez Interviewed by Jesse Hoffnung-Garskoff

Edgardo Meléndez's book Patria: Puerto Rican Revolutionaries in Nineteenth Century New York (Centro Press, 2019) examines the activities and ideals of Puerto Rican revolutionary exiles in New York City at the end of the nineteenth century. The study is centered in the writings, news reports, and announcements by and about Puerto Ricans in Patria, the official newspaper of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. Both were founded and led by the Cuban patriot José Martí.

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Review: Melissa Castillo Planas's A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture

Mexican (In)Visibility: Melissa Castillo Planas's Journey Into New York's Mexican State of Mind

Reviewed by Nelson Santana

When one thinks about Mexican migrants, often what comes to mind, partly due to conservative narratives, are Mexican-descended people in the US-Mexico border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. However, the Mexican community — some whose ancestors lived on Mexican land prior to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and who suddenly went from living in Mexico to living in the United States on the same land[1] — is dispersed throughout the United States with significant populations in Illinois, Washington, DC, and New York. The Mexican population in New York City is one that has been booming for quite some time.

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The Chinese Lady: An Interview with Nancy E. Davis

The Chinese Lady: An Interview with Nancy E. Davis

Interviewed by Hongdeng Gao

Today on the blog, editor Hongdeng Gao speaks to Nancy E. Davis about her recent book, The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America. Through creative use of disparate sources from many years of research, Davis captures the experiences of Afong Moy — the first recognized Chinese woman to arrive in America — as she introduced exotic goods from the East, as well as Chinese life, to the American public. The book provides rich insights into how Afong Moy’s presence changed Americans’ views of China and influenced American popular and material culture. It also sheds light on New York City’s role in the early US-China trade and the rise of the global marketplace.

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