The Pornographic Archive and New York City History
Reviewed by Jeffrey Patrick Colgan
Certain significant portions of New York City’s history are indelibly linked to the production and consumption of hardcore pornography, and, conversely, the history of hardcore is without a doubt indebted to the city’s artistic, cultural, and economic history. Following the 1957 Roth v. United States ruling — which concerned New York City bookseller Samuel Roth and resulted in a narrower definition of obscenity — a series of Supreme Court decisions liberalized the production and exhibition of pornography and ushered in the so-called Golden Age of Porn. New York City was at the center of this pornographic revolution, where movies with explicit penetrative sex (aka hardcore) received wide, albeit controversial, theatrical distribution.
Friday, Bloody Friday: David Paul Kuhn's The Hardhat Riot
Reviewed by Steven H. Jaffe
David Paul Kuhn’s The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution focuses on May 8, 1970, a symbolic date in the exodus of such voters from the “New Deal Coalition.” On that day hundreds of blue-collar workers — many of them construction workers building the World Trade Center — converged in the streets of lower Manhattan, chanting “U—S—A. All the Way!” as they physically attacked students protesting the Vietnam War. Over one hundred students, bystanders, and others were injured in the melee on the streets.
Explaining Amelia Norman’s Murder Attempt: Julie Miller’s Cry of Murder on Broadway
Reviewed by Lindsay Keiter
On the steps of the Astor Hotel on a fall evening in 1843, Amelia Norman plunged a small knife into her former lover’s chest. Immediately apprehended, Norman’s subsequent trial for attempted murder caused a media sensation. Championed by an unlikely coalition of middle-class moral reformers, including abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, and working-class political activists, Norman’s story did not “change history.”
Review: Martin V. Melosi's Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City
Reviewed by Simone M. Müller
Fresh Kills Landfill was a human-made structure whose scale was gigantic in every conceivable dimension. With some 400 staff on site, holding twenty different job titles, the facility covered an area of about 3,000 acres, 2200 of which were available for fill. At the peak of its operation, in the late 1980s, Fresh Kills received about 29,000 tons of New York City’s municipal solid waste on a daily basis. Until its closure in 2001, Fresh Kills functioned as the world’s largest landfill in the heart of one of the world’s megacities.
A Celebrity Orator in the Early Republic: Carolyn Eastman’s The Strange Genius of Mr. O
Reviewed by Mark Boonshoft
I have never had to worry about spoiler alerts when writing a book review. Until now. (I’ll try to confine them to the footnotes). Carolyn Eastman’s new book tells the tale of a Scottish-born, melancholic, laudanum-using celebrity who barnstormed the early-19th century United States and drew crowds to his eloquent oratorical performances. Who was this omnipresent, opium-addicted, opinionated, oracle of oratory? Mr. O, of course. The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The World of the United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity is a mesmerizing biography of an early American celebrity who, for a decade, was seemingly everywhere, and then everywhere forgotten.
The Privatized City from Below: Benjamin Holtzman’s The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism
Reviewed by Bench Ansfield
“Ford to City: Drop Dead” weighs in as one of the most legendary headlines in US history, and its notoriety likely owes to the apparent disjuncture between the New York City of the 1970s fiscal crisis and the supertall glass-scape of today.[1] These two urban archetypes, apparently worlds apart, are intimately linked, and few books have done more to shape how we conceptualize the dawning of a new metropolis than The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, by the late geographer Neil Smith.
A Sound as International as the City Itself: A Review of Benjamin Lapidus' New York and the International Sound of Latin Music, 1940-1990
Reviewed by Matthew Pessar Joseph
New York and the International Sound of Latin Music boasts an ambitious title. Yet Benjamin Lapidus’s history of Spanish Caribbean music in Gotham does not disappoint. By exploring overlooked Cuban, Puerto Rican, Panamanian, and Jewish performers, dancers, music teachers, and instrument builders, the author shows how between 1940 and 1990 New York served as a transnational mecca for Latinx music.
A Social History of Creative Work: Shannan Clark’s The Making of the American Creative Class
Reviewed by Emily Holloway
Shannan Clark’s The Making of the American Creative Class is, at first gloss, a rigorously detailed labor history of a particular subset of white-collar workers in the 20th century. Clark’s deliberately narrow sectoral focus — industrial design, print media, and advertising — also incorporates the complexities of cultural production under specific intellectual and political conditions. Rich with a detailed accounting of both the internal political strife within white-collar unions and the pervasive anticommunist anxiety of postwar America, Clark recovers a set of significant accomplishments among white-collar labor activists in mass culture.
The stories in Joseph P. Alessi’s Settling the Frontier are familiar ones. Europeans, drawn by Native trade networks, voyaged to North American ill-prepared for survival. Without Native American assistance, most of these European traders would not have survived let alone established permanent settlements. Alessi delves more deeply into these stories, and claims that the foundation for European settlement in North American began before Europeans ever arrived.
Everyday Politics are Everywhere in Arab New York: Emily Wills' Ethnography of a Community Under Pressure
Reviewed by Todd Fine
The defeat of Donald Trump promises the imminent end of the “Muslim ban” targeting people from several Arab countries, yet the challenges facing Muslim and Arab communities in the United States will surely continue. In the recent book Arab New York, University of Ottawa political scientist Emily Regan Wills seeks to depict how Arab communities in New York City, whose lives are greatly shaped by external politics, engage in politics themselves.
