Fraternal Purpose in the Establishment of Tammany’s “American Museum”

By Timothy Winkle

On May 21, 1791, a notice appeared in New York’s Daily Advertiser, announcing the opening of what would be the first public museum in the city. It had been established “for the purpose of collecting and preserving every thing relating to the history of America, likewise, every American production of nature or art.” The “generous public” was implored to help grow the collections, an appeal not only to wealthy patrons or men of science, but, in true republican fashion, to the people themselves, for “as almost every individual possesses some article, which in itself is of little value, but in a collective view, becomes of real importance.” It would truly be an “American Museum,” of the people, by the people, and for the people. Unlike other collections of the period, this museum was uniquely created by a fraternal organization, one that most citizens of New York City knew from their parades through the streets, members dressed in supposed Indian garb. The Society of Tammany, or Columbian Order, sought to keep the spirit of patriotism alive in the hearts and minds of the city’s populace, and this museum, “although quite in its infancy,” was born of this same fraternal purpose.

Guest UserNovember 21, 2019Comment

Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

Reviewed by Jocelyn Wills

In his latest book on city planning and the built environment, Thomas J. Campanella tackles the history of his hometown, Brooklyn, once, and until the consolidation of New York City’s five boroughs in 1898, the fourth-largest city in the United States. In 18 chronological episodes, Campanella follows Brooklyn’s history from the 17th-century encounter between the native Leni Lenape and immigrant Dutch, through its revolutionary experience, and on to its 19th-century rise and 20th-century decline as a major urban-industrial zone. Following a discussion of Brooklyn’s demise during the turbulent 1950s-1970s, Campanella then provides a short epilogue that considers the borough’s more recent revivification as a hot-spot of gentrification. Brooklyn: The Once and Future City thus joins a growing number of scholarly works attempting to rescue Brooklyn from is historic treatment as a “city of homes and churches” and America’s “first suburb.” Indeed, over the past twenty years, excellent monographs employing Brooklyn as a significant site for scholarly inquiry have finally begun to replace the coffee-table books that long lined the two or three shelves that New York City bookstores devoted to Brooklyn and Kings County.

Guest UserNovember 19, 2019Comment

Building for Us: Stories of Homesteading and Cooperative Housing

Reviewed by Katie Uva

New York City is in the throes of a housing crisis. Soaring housing costs and stagnant wages have left increasing numbers of New Yorkers rent-burdened, and have moved the possibility of homeownership even farther out of reach in a city that has always been dominated by renters. Pro-growth voices argue that rezoning and incentivizing private developers to do more building would open up supply and alleviate the crisis; progressives resist that narrative and see such ideas as furthering the city’s capitulation to the private sector and worsening the tension between housing as an asset versus housing as a right. Conflicts abound about how to create affordable housing, how to define affordable housing, and how to sustain affordable housing.

Housing & Realty, ReviewsGuest UserNovember 14, 2019Comment

How States Shaped Postwar America: State Government and Urban Power

Reviewed By Michael R. Glass

New York City residents are often lampooned, perhaps justifiably, for their provincialism. As the iconic 1976 New Yorker cover encapsulated, for many New Yorkers the world might as well end at the Hudson River. But consider how much the state government affects their daily lives. Every morning, the typical New Yorker commutes on a subway car financed with state-backed bonds. If they work in the financial district or in Times Square, they likely ascend an office tower constructed with state tax subsidies. If they attend a business convention, take the bar exam, or mourn at a presidential election party, they will find themselves in the glass cubes of a state-built convention center. For college, many will attend a public university elsewhere in the state, or if they stay closer to home, a city university, where the state still pays over half the operating costs. For a quick weekend get-away, they will drive on a state-maintained highway to a hiking trail, campground, or ski resort at a state-run park in the Catskills or Adirondacks.

Guest UserNovember 12, 2019Comment

Sight and Memory at the Crossroads in Manhattan

By Marjorie N. Feld

First, as with so many things, the Manhattan course needed a name. In 2017, the Glavin Office of Multicultural and International Education asked me to teach Babson College’s first undergraduate “elective away,” an in-depth history of Manhattan to be taught in Manhattan. As with students on campuses across the country, Babson students of all backgrounds are increasingly accessing electives abroad; this was a full-credit course within U.S. Borders—away and not abroad—and it needed a name.

Guest UserNovember 7, 2019Comment

Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music and Dance in New York, 1840-1917

Everybody’s Doin’it: Sex, Music and Dance in New York, 1840-1917

Reviewed by Jeffrey Escoffier

Dirty Dancing, the 1987 movie starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, exploited a common cultural trope: the intimate connection many people feel between dancing and sex. It portrayed a couple whose dancing was explicitly sexual, who came from different social classes and who at the same time were falling in love. For many of its viewers, it presented a very romantic vision of the connection between sex and dancing. Dale Cockrell’s Everybody’s Doin’it: Sex, Music and Dance in New York, 1840-1917 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 2019) sets out to explore a more historical account of the interrelationship between popular music, social dancing and sexuality in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. As he shows, the making of popular music during the nineteenth-century often took place in bars, brothels and dance halls where prostitution was endemic. Social dancing was one of the ways that sex and music are linked.

Reviews, Gender & Sexuality, Antebellum & Civil War, Gilded AgeGuest UserNovember 5, 2019Comment

Roar, Lion, Roar: Columbia Football History

By Joanna Rios and Jocelyn Wilk

This fall, the staff of the Columbia University Archives curated an exhibition at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library's Chang Octagon entitled "Roar, Lion, Roar: A Celebration of Columbia Football" (August 26-December 20, 2019). It's been a labor of love for us and we are thrilled to share the stories, artwork, photographs, and documents that tell the history of one of the oldest college football programs in the country. Our exhibit consists of six wall cases and three display cubes. It is not the biggest of spaces, but in it, we are able to showcase the places, the people, and the high and low points of this distinguished athletic program. But not everything can make it into the exhibit.

Guest UserOctober 31, 2019Comment

The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way

Reviewed by Steven H. Jaffe

One of the privileges of growing up in New York City, or of visiting the city at a young age, is the opportunity to be exposed to the magic of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Long before e-games, the internet, or even radio and television, the museum’s treasures brought to life the creatures and peoples of the world and the wonders of the universe. Admittedly, recent confrontations with activists protesting the racial politics of the museum’s Theodore Roosevelt Memorial statue on Central Park West and the outdated portrayal of Native Americans in its galleries, as well as critical assessments by scholars, point up just how profoundly AMNH and other museums founded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nurtured some of our most toxic assumptions. The museum’s past trustees, directors, curators, and designers played pivotal roles in bringing to public life a referential framework that classified all non-European peoples as “other” and in some sense “primitive.” (Evidently, non-Europeans, no matter how complex or dynamic their cultures, fell under the rubric of “Natural History,” just like orangutans, jellyfish, or dinosaurs—a fate avoided by European societies and their offshoots, and a categorization that still burdens museums in this century.)

Peter-Christian AignerOctober 29, 2019Comment

Tudor City: Manhattan’s Historic Residential Enclave

By Lawrence R. Samuel

Walk east a few blocks from Grand Central Station along 42nd Street, take the stairs near the Church of the Covenant and voila!—you’ve entered another world. Tudor City—the five-acre faux medieval village, albeit with high-rise apartment buildings—is on the far east side of midtown Manhattan between First and Second Avenues and 40th and 43rd Streets, right around the corner from the United Nations. Tudor City is not just the architectural masterpiece created by real estate developer Fred F. French and the first residential skyscraper complex in the world; it’s a unique community that has played a significant role in the history of New York City over nearly the past century. The story of the “city within a city,” as it quickly became known, tells us much about life in Manhattan since the late 1920s, when the development came into being.

Manhattan, Urban Planning, Housing & RealtyGuest UserOctober 24, 2019Comment

A Penny Earned is a Penny Saved: Pratt Institute’s “Thrift”

By Sandra Roff

There have been recent articles in the press concerning the fact that children do not save their money.

A recent New York Times article stated that the average weekly allowance is a whopping $30 a week but only 3% of parents reported that their children saved any of the money. Let’s turn back the clock one hundred and thirty-two years, to 1887 Brooklyn, New York, when Charles Pratt, a businessman turned philanthropist founded Pratt Institute to educate both men and women. On Founder’s Day at Pratt in 1889, Mr. Pratt announced, “that an association, to be called the Pratt Institute Thrift Association, which for convenience will be known as the Thrift, will be organized at once.” This new association was formed to help people in general, but particularly young people in saving and wisely investing their earnings.

Peter-Christian AignerOctober 22, 2019Comment

Gotham

Fraternal Purpose in the Establishment of Tammany’s “American Museum”

Brooklyn: The Once and Future City

Building for Us: Stories of Homesteading and Cooperative Housing

How States Shaped Postwar America: State Government and Urban Power

Sight and Memory at the Crossroads in Manhattan

Everybody’s Doin’it: Sex, Music and Dance in New York, 1840-1917

Roar, Lion, Roar: Columbia Football History

The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way

Tudor City: Manhattan’s Historic Residential Enclave

A Penny Earned is a Penny Saved: Pratt Institute’s “Thrift”