In 1988, director Elia Kazan recalled a story in which he and Broadway scenic designer Boris Aronson drove cross-country together on a research trip for their latest theatrical collaboration. According to Kazan, as they entered New Mexico, Aronson pointed to a single tree growing atop a chain of hills barren of any other vegetation and said, “Without this tree, these hills would not exist.” As single elements, neither the tree nor the hills attract notice. But when taken together, it is the tree that draws the eye to the hills, bringing them into focus, making them relevant.
Dutch-American Stories: On the First Dutch Translation of the U.S. Constitution
By Michael Douma
There are a few topics that guarantee a historian an audience. Write a decent biography of Abraham Lincoln or James Madison, for example, and you are bound to have readers. Or, write something new and interesting about the Constitution and you might attract some attention.
“Fellow Citizens Too”: Puerto Ricans and Migration Politics in the New York Amsterdam News, 1954
By Daniel Acosta Elkan
On March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire on the members of the House of Representatives from the gallery of the body’s chamber in Washington DC. This was but the most dramatic event in an important year for the Puerto Rican diaspora, and its effects were felt in profoundly local ways. In East Harlem, the most prominent stateside Boricua community, the FBI conducted a number of raids on bars, restaurants, and other community spaces. The New York Amsterdam News, the city’s leading Black newspaper, reported that “Negroes and Puerto Ricans are reportedly being rounded up, searched, and subjected to other indignities.”
Since the late 1950s, New York City has been an epicenter of rumba outside Cuba. For more than six decades, a rumbacircle in Central Park has embraced those of African descent from Spanish-speaking islands (Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans) and Latin America (Panamanians, Colombians), local African Americans, AfroLatinxs (Nuyorican, NuyoDominicans, Cuban Americans) and those from other diasporas including American Jews. A focus on Central Park rumba illustrates the intricacies and ancestral functionings of the African Diaspora present in contemporary New York.
“Mortars over Stapleton Heights”: Audre Lorde on Staten Island
By David Allen
In the poem, “On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge,” Lorde contemplates leaving Staten Island where she had lived for nearly thirteen years. Her connections to the place were complex, bringing together her love of nature, her need for a place to write and work, to be with her lover and her children, as well as with other poets and activists. All these had come to pass within a social and political climate inscribed with racism, homophobia, and violence.
Rethinking Ellis Island: A History of Asian Detention and Deportation
Reviewed by Maria Paz G. Esguerra
Anna Pegler-Gordon’s Closing the Golden Door: Asian Migration and the Hidden History of Exclusion at Ellis Island offers a glimpse into the very interesting career of Ellis Island and traces its evolution from an immigration station into a detention and deportation center. This evolution unfolds in multiple chapters that focus on the relatively small number, but diverse group of Asian immigrants and nonimmigrants who have often and long been overlooked by scholars of migration: stowaways, smugglers, and sailors, Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans detained during World War II, and Chinese accused of pro-Communist activities in the Cold War.
Soyica Diggs Colbert’s Radical Vision eschews a traditional biographical account of artist-intellectual Lorraine Hansberry. Regarding Hansberry’s oeuvre as a “writing of her life,” Colbert asserts, that Hansberry used her work to creatively imagine an alternative way of being in the world through global collective emancipation. Thus, her writing was a source of her becoming in a world that persistently misunderstood — “misapprehended” — the playwright as well as her work.
Settler colonialism is not a story of friendly relations throughout. The confrontation with an unfamiliar other creates wariness and suspicion and often leads to violent outbursts in which noncombatants become innocent victims. Manhattan in the seventeenth century was no exception, as the events of 1643 show.
“Never No Wells of Lonelinesses in Harlem:” Black Lady Lovers in Prohibition Era New York
By Cookie Woolner
In 1928, the British novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall was published in the United States, which brought conversations on the topic of lesbianism into the mainstream like never before. The book was one of the first on the subject written by someone who openly identified as queer. Although the novel was deemed controversial and became the object of censorship trials in the United States and at home in Britain, this notoriety helped it become a best seller in bookstores nationwide, including in Harlem. In February 1929, African American journalist Geraldyn Dismond reviewed the annual masquerade ball at the Hamilton Lodge, which had become one of the preeminent institutionsof queer life uptown.
New York City “600” Schools and the Legacy of Segregation in Special Education
By Francine Almash
In 1947 the New York City Board of Education announced the first centralized program for delinquent and maladjusted youth, known as the “600” schools (for their number designation). The “600” schools were the result of coordinated efforts beginning in the 1920s that linked the NYC Board of Education, the Bureau of Educational Measurements, which promoted psychological testing to aid in the education of “emotionally handicapped” children, and the New York City Children’s Courts, which gave judges the authority to act as surrogate parents to a growing number of “at-risk” youth.
