Review: The Great Migration and the Democratic Party
Reviewed by Christopher Shell
The migration of roughly six million Black Americans to the North between 1915-1965 is the subject of Keneshia N. Grant’s book, The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century. In the United States popular imagination, when we think about the Great Migration, we may think about its cultural implications such as the Harlem Renaissance, the New Negro movement, or Motown. Perhaps we think about its impact on Black radical activity such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Nation of Islam, or the Black Panther Party. Grant’s study, rather, urges readers to reconceptualize the Great Migration as an event that critically transformed the northern political system.
Interview: Anthony Tamburri on the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute
Interviewed by Adam Kocurek
Today on the blog, Gotham editor Adam Kocurek speaks with the dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Anthony Tamburri about the history of the Institute, and the work it does for supporting Italian American scholars and the history of Italian Americans.
This Is a Cemetery: The Saga of the Second Asbury African Methodist Episcopal Church Cemetery of Staten Island
ByPatricia M. Salmon
Having studied cemeteries for the last thirty-six years and spending the first nineteen years of my life living next to a Homestead Graveyard that was abandoned, I should perhaps not be so surprised about the demise of Second Asbury, an African Methodist Episcopal Church Cemetery in Port Richmond Center, Staten Island, also known colloquially as “Cherry Lane.” Designated a “Colored Cemetery” because African-Americans were interred at the site, it used to be called the “Old Slave’s Burying Ground.” Not only was the last living enslaved person from Staten Island buried therein, but numerous others were, too.
The Great Disappearing Act: An Interview with Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson
Interviewed by Hongdeng Gao
Today on the Blog, Gotham editor Hongdeng Gao speaks to Christina Ziegler-McPherson about her latest book, The Great Disappearing Act: Germans in New York City, 1880-1930. Ziegler-McPherson discusses how over the span of a few decades, New York City’s German community went from being the best positioned to promote a new, more pluralistic American culture that they themselves had helped to create to being an invisible group. She offers fresh insights into how German immigration shaped cultural, financial, and social institutions in New York City and debates about assimilation and multi-lingualism in the United States.
Anti-Asian Violence and Acts of Community Care from the 1980s to the Present
Vivian Truong Interviewed by Hongdeng Gao
Today on the Blog, Gotham’s editor Hongdeng Gao speaks with Vivian Truong, author of “From State-Sanctioned Removal to the Right to the City” and a core committee member of the A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project.Truong discusses segregationist and police violence against Asian American, Black and Latinx residents in southern Brooklyn in the 1980s and 1990s and the cross-group, cross-issue movements that developed in response to such violence.
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.
The Bank of United States, East European Jews and the Lost World of Immigrant Banking
By Rebecca A. Kobrin
On a particularly cold morning ninety-one years ago this month, the owner of a small candy store in the Bronx went to his branch of the Bank of United States to withdraw some much-needed cash. Over the past two years, the bank had been selling its shares to its depositors throughout New York city to help raise funds, guaranteeing their investment would maintain its value. The Bank promised it would buy back shares at any point. Now, this storeowner was taking them up on it.
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.
“I have shoes to my feet this time”: May Swenson, New York City, and the FWP
By Margaret A. Brucia
Penniless and hungry, her clothes in tatters, May Swenson was an emergency case for the Workers Alliance (WAA) in March 1938. She was fed at St. Barnabas House on Mulberry Street (“Boy, that butterless bread, gravyless potatoes, hashed turnips & salt-less meatloaf tasted swell!”)[1] and then given fifteen dollars to buy new shoes and clothing at S. Klein’s at Union Square and E 14th Street. “Jesus!” was all she could write in her diary.
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."
