Defending New York After the Revolution: The Governorship of John Jay

By Robb K. Haberman

A specter haunted the city and port of New York during the Quasi-War (1798-1800) and the years preceding it. With the young republics of France and the United States engaged in undeclared naval warfare, New Yorkers feared a seaborne strike would lay waste to their community and cripple its thriving maritime commerce. Although unrealized, these fears were certainly justified; despite attempts to construct an adequate system of defense, the city remained incapable of withstanding assault. Indeed, in March 1798, one official highlighted New York’s vulnerability, noting that its immense wealth and property “invite invasion” and that it would be helpless if set upon by a “single Twenty Gun privateer.” Many residents recalled with bitterness the great fire of 1776, a conflagration that had destroyed a quarter of the city, and feared that New York would soon be revisited by a similar trauma.

Early Republic, Manhattan, PoliticsGuest UserMay 31, 2018Comment

Black Nationalist Women's Activism in 1920s Harlem

By Keisha N. Blain

Founded by Marcus Garvey, with the assistance of Amy Ashwood, in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1914, the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) was the largest and most influential Pan-Africanist movement of the twentieth century. Emphasizing racial pride, black political self-determination, racial separatism, African heritage, economic self-sufficiency, and African redemption from European colonization, Garvey envisioned the UNIA as a vehicle for improving the social, political, and economic conditions of black people everywhere. From Kingston, Jamaica, Garvey oversaw UNIA affairs before relocating to Harlem. At its peak, from 1919 to 1924, the organization attracted millions of followers in more than forty countries around the world.

This post is excerpted and adapted from Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom, courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Press.

Gender & Sexuality, Manhattan, Politics, Race & EthnicityGuest UserMay 28, 2018Comment

Anne Fleming's City of Debtors: A Century of Fringe Finance

Reviewed by Erin Cully

The commercial streets in Flatbush are dotted with storefronts advertising rent-to-own furniture sets and appliances. Pawnbrokers and payday lenders call out to passersby, promising “dollars now” in exchange for gold or a paycheck. Many Americans are accustomed to buying consumer goods by swiping a credit card, but for low-income families in New York and elsewhere, access to credit is limited. Small-sum lenders, pawnbrokers, and furniture stores offering installment plans are often the only recourse for households whose economic circumstances threaten to deny them access to the consumption habits that have defined American freedom for most of the twentieth century. These forms of credit have a high price tag, and goods purchased can end up costing several times more than if bought in cash. Families denied access to conventional forms of credit know all too well how “extremely expensive it is to be poor,” as James Baldwin put it.

Business & Labor, Poverty & Inequality, ReviewsGuest UserMay 24, 2018Comment

Bringing New Netherland back to Breuckelen: Exploring Brooklyn’s Dutch Roots

By Andrea C. Mosterman

Why is it important to study New York’s Dutch past? That is the question a New Netherland Institute (NNI) conference in Brooklyn will address on June 1st and 2nd. I talked with Dennis Maika, senior historian and education director of the New Netherland Institute, about New York’s Dutch history and the Brooklyn event.

Brooklyn, New AmsterdamGuest UserMay 22, 2018Comment

"Most Everything Was Still Dutch”: Against the British Era Declension Narrative

By Joyce D. Goodfriend

The tenacity with which many Dutch commoners held to their native language — even as it diverged from the Dutch spoken in the Netherlands — did not escape the notice of influential New Yorkers. In the midst of the hotly contested election of 1768, politicians courting the vote of the city’s Dutch-speakers arranged to print a Dutch version of “A Kick for the Whipper by Sir Isaac Foot,” a partisan essay, in the New-York Gazette. In February 1775, when the printer of the New-York Journal published the “whole proceedings of the continental congress, held in Philadelphia in September and October 1774,” he alerted readers that his edition included “the principal parts, translated into Low Dutch.” Improbable as it may seem in light of the fact that English had long been “the language where power... resided,” Dutch remained a living language in New York City long after members of the elite assumed it would be displaced by English.

Reprinted from Who Should Rule at Home? Confronting the Elite in British New York City, by Joyce D. Goodfriend. Copyright © 2017 by Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

British Era, Politics, ExcerptsGuest UserMay 17, 2018Comment

A "Madhouse in all its Naked Ugliness and Horror": An Interview with Stacy Horn

Today on Gotham, associate editor David Thomson speaks with Stacy Horn, author of the new book Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th Century New York, about the dark history of Blackwell's Island, known more commonly today as Roosevelt Island.

Crime & Policing, Gilded Age, InterviewsGuest UserMay 15, 2018Comment

A Woman of Her Time: An interview with Joanna Scutts

Today on Gotham, editor Nick Juravich sits down with Joanna Scutts to discuss her new book, The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like it.

Gender & Sexuality, Interviews, ManhattanGuest UserMay 10, 2018Comment

A (Female) Walker in the City: An interview with Lauren Elkin

Today on Gotham, editor Nick Juravich speaks with Lauren Elkin, about her recent book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, selected as a Book of the Year by the Financial Times, Guardian, New Statesman, Observer, The Millions and Emerald Street, and shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

Gender & Sexuality, Interviews, ManhattanGuest UserMay 8, 2018Comment

Where Suffrage Took Flight: Staten Island and the Woman Suffrage Movement

By Gabriella Leone

On May 20, 1913, nationally renowned suffragist, Rosalie Gardiner Jones, made a spectacular debut in Staten Island, where she became the first suffrage activist to fly for the cause. To achieve this feat, she met her pilot Harry Bingham Brown, one of Staten Island’s resident pilots, at the Grant City train station and boarded his plane. The New York Times reported, “Gen. Rosalie did not show a sign of fear as she took her seat in the biplane, seized a steel rod, the only thing to hold to, with her left hand, had her skirts tied down with a little piece of blue string, and, with a bunch of leaflets in her right hand, nodded a smiling good-bye to the crowd below.” Decorated with 'Votes for Women' banners, the plane arrived at its destination, roughly two miles away on the island’s eastern shore, in fifteen minutes. It landed at the Flying Carnival of the Staten Island Aeronautical Society in a flurry of yellow leaflets, which Jones had been scattering along the way.

Gender & Sexuality, Politics, Progressive Era, Staten IslandGuest UserMay 3, 2018Comment

Rivers, Filth and Heat: Riverbaths and the Fight over Public Bathing

By Naomi Adiv

In the summer of 1870, New York City got its first municipal bath: swimming pools sunk into the rivers, through which river water flowed. An 1871 New York Times article describes them: “baths are of the usual house-like model, and have a swimming area of eighty-five feet in length by sixty-five feet in width. They are… provided with sixty-eight dressing-rooms, have offices and rooms in an additional story, and are well lighted with gas for night bathing.” In the year after they were built, the Department of Public Works reported that they were regularly used to their capacity, particularly on hot summer days. At their height, there were twenty-two such baths around the waters of New York City.