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Posts in Race & Ethnicity
An Excerpt from New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century

Excerpt From New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century

By Sabrina Fuchs Abrams

The question remains, why does women’s humor continue to be overlooked and undervalued? And why did these New York women of wit feel the need to mask their social critique through humor? The primary resistance to women’s humor goes back to false assumptions about feminine versus masculine behavior associated with the expression of intellect, aggression, and humor. Women were not supposed to “get” jokes, and they were certainly not expected to tell jokes.

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Sarah Smith Tompkins Garnet: A Most Remarkable Suffragist

Sarah Smith Tompkins Garnet: A Most Remarkable Suffragist

By Susan Goodier

Black women did not need white women to patronize, direct, organize, or financially support their efforts. They already had quite a few active suffragists, and several prominent leaders, including Sarah Garnet, and at least one organization in the city dedicated to women’s suffrage. In fact, virtually every Black women organization, established for whatever purpose—anti-lynching, racial uplift, integrated education, temperance—also supported women’s suffrage. It is the universality and intersectionality of Black women’s vision of equality and rights for women—as opposed to exclusion and limitation—that differentiates their suffrage activism from that of many white women’s organizations of the period.

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Streets in Play: The Playstreets Photographs of Katrina Thomas

Streets in Play: The Playstreets Photography of Katrina Thomas

By Rebekah Burgess and Mariana Mogilevich

Photographs of recreation programs like this one were commissioned to offer visual proof that, after four summers of nation-wide protest and violence, starting in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1964, the city was compensating for a long-term lack of investment in low-income, racially segregated neighborhoods…. A few of Thomas’ images were utilized for official purposes, reproduced in pamphlets to attract or to thank program sponsors, but her exceptional eye transcended the municipal task. Her lens recorded the city's sponsored activities as well as the more candid action at the edge of the frame. These captivating, impromptu images provide a rare perspective on a distressed urban landscape, privileging a child’s-eye view of the possibilities for play and delight.

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Yoko Ono's Debut in Cold War New York

Yoko Ono’s Debut in Cold War New York

By Brigid Cohen

Ono’s earliest performances took place in the Chambers Street Loft Series, which featured artists who had met in [John] Cage’s composition class at the New School. For this performance series, Ono conceived the idea of renting the loft of a hundred-year-old Italianate commercial building in Tribeca and paid the $50.50 monthly rent. Ono co-organized the series with the composer La Monte Young. Nonetheless, her works did not appear formally on the series program. And Ono found herself denied credit for her role in organizing and producing the series, which Young claimed as solely his own in the series invitations, programs, and oral history….Ono creatively responded to the challenge of her own noninclusion by staging dramatic guerilla performances.

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Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster: The Antebellum South's Love-Hate Affair with New York City

Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster: The Antebellum South’s Love-Hate Affair with New York City

Review by Emily Holloway

In 1788… a mere 62 bales were shipped to Europe via New York, compared to 153,757 less than thirty years later (2)….Despite the lengthy and arduous journey, tourists, planters, and writers flocked to the city... During their visits, these elite southerners – many of whom owned cotton plantations -- were rubbing elbows with New York’s mercantile and financial leaders,… The close social ties that developed between these classes built on their intimate financial connections through cotton… southern writers remarked critically on the vast economic inequality on display throughout the rapidly growing city, a characteristic they frequently tied to the machinations of industrial capitalism. This critique was frequently deployed as a reaction to northern abolitionist sentiments, a false equivalence between the ravages of industrial “wage slavery” and the racist violence of plantation slavery.

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Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry, by Nicole Saffold Maskiell

Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry

Review by Emily Holloway

Maskiell argues that both social groups – the enslavers and the enslaved – built, maintained, and challenged their respective terms of community and belonging, whether through diplomacy or corporate mergers disguised as marriage arrangements or by sustaining regional networks of contacts to foment rebellion and resistance. The text at times navigates a vast geographic scale, but successfully keeps the narrative grounded in the roots of elite Dutch society in seventeenth century New Netherlands…The overall book project seeks to illuminate the incremental and cumulative changes along with the continuities linking Dutch colonial practices to English colonial institutions in the transition from New Netherlands to New York.

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Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics by Anastasia C. Curwood

Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics

Review by Michael Woodsworth

Chisholm entered Congress as a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, a staunch defender of the Great Society, an advocate of expanded welfare benefits, and an unapologetic feminist. Despite her reputation as a “fiery idealist,” Curwood argues, she was also “ruthlessly pragmatic.” Chisholm was a coalition builder: she helped to found the Congressional Black Caucus as well as the National Women’s Political Caucus…. The 1972 presidential primary run remains Chisholm’s signature moment.… Chisholm may have been a transformational figure, but, as Curwood shows, she was also a product of her times. Her rise, accomplishments, and setbacks match, almost too perfectly, the arc of 20th-century American liberalism.

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Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes

Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes

Review by M. Syd Rosen

Musical Migration and Imperial New York contends that by understanding how experimental music was enlisted in the American imperial project—indeed, by examining how such music co-produced this project—we might better understand the complicated ways in which creative experimentation is entangled with questions of identity and institutional power. The author is well aware of the scale of her task, which investigates how “state ambitions on a planetary scale” resulted in experimental music operating as “a force field of US global prestige and power.”

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The Insider: A Life of Virginia C. Gildersleeve by Nancy Woloch

The Insider: A Life of Virginia C. Gildersleeve

Review by Marjorie N. Feld

During her life, some members of the public drew connections between her antisemitism and her fervent anti-Zionism. But Woloch is right to separate these developments--there were Jews who rejected Zionism and many non-Jewish anti-Zionists who were not antisemitic. Gildersleeve pointed to her affection for Arab people and nations as the root of her anti-Zionism. This affection was, to be sure, inflected with Orientalism and the desire of some Progressives to remake Arab nations in the Protestant image. Still, she saw in Zionism the makings of bitter conflict in the Middle East. …Gildersleeve was active in the American Friends of the Middle East, a CIA-funded organization designed to cultivate closer ties between the U.S. and Middle East Arab nations… Digging deep into her controversial positions on Jews and Zionism, Woloch explains how the pieces of Gildersleeve’s worldview fit together.

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A Seat at the Table: LGBTQ Representation in New York Politics

A Seat at the Table: LGBTQ Representation in New York Politics, Exhibit at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives

Reviewed by Danica Stompor

The beating heart of Gourjon-Bieltvedt and Petrus’s exhibit is turning these testimonies into a fervent call to young people for optimism and for action…It has been far from a linear path, but for many people my age and younger, the past decades have featured an enormous increase in visibility and significant legal wins for queer people, particularly in New York. A Seat at the Table inserts us into the lives and tactics of the city’s elected officials who made these gains possible while resisting the attitude that progress is inevitable…A Seat at the Table is attuned to the small moments that transform residents into leaders.

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