Dismantling Jim Crow from the Stage: A Review of The Civil Rights Theatre Movement in New York, 1939-1966
Reviewed by Madeline Steiner
Back in the olden days, before the global spread of COVID-19, when we could freely attend live theatre, I was fortunate enough to see the 2011 revival of Alice Childress’s play Trouble in Mind at Arena Stage in Washington, DC. Written in 1955, the play, a metatheatrical commentary on Black civil rights, contains a complex message about racial representation, whites’ complicity in upholding racist institutions, and a critique of civil rights plays from earlier in the 20th century. Over half a century after it was written, the play is still quite stirring and its civil rights message feels unfortunately just as relevant now as at the time of its writing.
Have you recently trekked to a farmers’ market for fresh produce? In this lockdown year, do you miss attending concerts at Carnegie Hall? A Broadway show? Have you enjoyed roaming through the romantic landscape of Central Park, or wandered the streets of the city’s historic districts? Do you go out of your way to experience the inspiring urban spaces of Grand Central Terminal? Are you invigorated when you head west to the Hudson River Park and marvel at the river’s recovery?
New York and the Death of the Atlantic Slave Trade
Reviewed by Samantha Payne
John Harris’s The Last Slave Ships: New York City and the End of the Middle Passage reveals how and why the long survival of the slave trade in the United States was related to the politics of slavery across the Atlantic World. During the first half of the 19th century, more than seventy-five percent of enslaved Africans transported to the New World arrived in Brazil. In 1850, Brazil abolished the slave trade — an act which, Harris argues, transformed the inner workings of the illegal traffic in the United States.
New York: Where the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get… Art?
Reviewed by Alexis Monroe
The class divisions inherent in the New York art world which Rachel Klein deftly identifies in her book are all too persistent today. Art Wars: The Politics of Taste in Nineteenth Century New York promises a history of taste fundamentally informed by class tensions and sectional strife. Klein crafts this history around three case studies, which she sees as defining events in the 19th-century art world: the collapse of the American Art-Union in 1852, the controversy in the mid-1880s around the Cesnola collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the push in the mid-1880s to open the Met on Sundays.
Clifford Mason’s Macbeth in Harlem traces how African-American theater artists shaped theater in the United States, beginning in the early 19th century and ending in the mid-20th century. Mason reveals how events gave rise to different Black performers and movements, beginning with Harlem’s particular contributions to Broadway and concluding with a discussion of the post-World War II conditions that gave rise to Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in The Sun.
American Capitalism: New Histories, edited by Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, encapsulates the diverse, expansive historical work that has come to define the NHC in the decade since it first burst onto the historiographical scene in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis. In their brisk introduction to the volume, Beckert and Desan sketch the intellectual genealogies of NHC scholarship and lay out its program in broad strokes, necessary given the wide variety of scholarship brought together in American Capitalism.
At this moment, the United States confronts multiple crises. COVID-19 has killed more than 200,000 people and infected more than six million, though these numbers are certainly undercounted. The virus’s impact, though indiscriminate, is disproportionately felt in communities of color who are more likely to experience serious illness, hospitalization, and death.
Party Profits: Political Machines as Money-Making Ventures in Gilded Age New York
Reviewed by Atiba Pertilla
The 2020 presidential campaign is coming to a close with controversies swirling over the alleged and established entanglement of the two main candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, in a variety of schemes to use their political position to benefit themselves or their families. At the heart of these concerns lies a conviction that profiting from political connections is a primary driver of Americans’ loss of faith in their elected representatives. Electoral Capitalism, a new book by Jeffrey Broxmeyer, focuses on public graft and political machines in Gilded Age New York and is a timely look at how earlier voters faced similar questions.
Thomas J. Shelley has added to his already substantial oeuvre of New York Catholic history with the publication of Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese: The Church of the Ascension, New York City, 1895-2020 (New York: Empire State Editions, 2020).[1] His deep and broad understanding of New York’s Catholic institutions provides the context for his study of the Church of the Ascension, which was founded in 1895 on the Upper West Side. While his history of Ascension starts from its founding, Shelley’s book offers an extended view of the neighborhood during the 1960s and 1970s, a period when demographic transition overlapped with economic decline and produced immense political conflicts that destabilized New York’s institutions, including the Catholic Church.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the South Bronx was the epicenter of American “ruin.” In the popular imagination, flames engulfed acres of developed cityscape; poverty and violence mingled with the remains of abandoned buildings; and a crack epidemic degenerated entire neighborhoods.
