Tong Kee Hang: A Chinese American Civil War Veteran Who Was Stripped of His Citizenship
By Kristin Choo
May is Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage month, an appropriate time to recognize the Chinese Americans whose lives were disrupted, constricted or uprooted by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and other racist laws and policies. Tong Kee Hang did not suffer the most egregious mistreatment meted out to Chinese immigrants during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was not beaten, lynched, or driven from his home like many others. But the loss of his citizenship and right to vote was a cruel blow for a man who had served his country in wartime and who took deep pride in being American.
Being Black in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam vs. New Amsterdam
By Jeroen Dewulf
Due to a paucity of original sources, many questions regarding the social and religious behavior of New Amsterdam’s Black population have remained unanswered. One way of approaching the existing scholarship with new insights is by using a comparative methodology. Naturally, the observation that similarities in behavior existed in more than one place does not automatically imply that the origin and historical development of one corresponds to that of the other. However, since it is unlikely that many new sources about Manhattan’s earliest Black inhabitants will still be uncovered in the coming decades, a comparative perspective is probably the best strategy to shed new light on this historically marginalized community.
Book Review: Catherine Collomp’s Rescue, Relief, and Resistance
Reviewed by Natalia Dubno Shevin
Catherine Collomp’s Rescue, Relief, and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee’s Anti-Nazi Operations, 1934-1945 is the first monograph to uncover the rescues and aid that the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) provided to trade unionists, socialists, and Jews trapped in Europe after the rise of Nazism and fascism during the Second World War. The emergence of the JLC in 1934 and its successful rescue of 1,500 individuals from occupied France, via Spain and Portugal, and Polish Bundists from Lithuania, via the Soviet Union and Japan, reflected the strength of World War II-era Jewish labor in New York City.
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.
