The Doctors Blackwell: An Interview with Janice Nimura
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, Gotham editor Katie Uva speaks to Janice Nimura, author of The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine. The book is a joint biography of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, and her sister Emily Blackwell, the third woman to do so. The book examines the Blackwells’ struggle to obtain training and credentials in the increasingly professionalized field of medicine in the 19th century, and also provides insights into 19th century New York as a place of opportunity and obstacles for these groundbreaking women.
Piecework, Peddlers, and Prostitutes: Intertwined Lives on the Lower East Side
By Deena Ecker
At the dawn of the 20th century, the stoop of 102 Allen Street, near the corner of Delancey Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side hopped with activity. Children played in front of the building, competing for space with “those women, called ‘Naphkes’” who would “say to men: ‘Come up’.” Isaac Yarmus, just 12 years old, said that when he “went on the stoop the Naphkes would take my hat and throw it into the street and tell me to keep away from the stoop.” Meanwhile, the building’s housekeeper, Hester Wolf, kept careful watch and would “say to the Naphkes: ‘Go inside’. when she saw a policeman or detective coming along the street.”
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.
Freedom Songs: Socialist Multiculturalism and the Protest Lyric from Percy Shelley to Chaim Zhitlovsky
By Benjamin Schacht
As protests exploded around the United States in the wake of the excruciating police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor last June, the venerable New York City-based Yiddish daily the Forward ran a story with the headline “‘We Shall Overcome’ sung in Yiddish.” Highlighting the ongoing dialogue between American Jews the civil rights movement, the article mostly focused on a recently adapted Yiddish version of the classic civil rights anthem. But it also touched on a somewhat more obscure Yiddish contribution to the movement, Un du akerst, un du zeyst (“And you plow, and you sow,” also known as “The Hammer Song”), a song that Theodore Bikel performed for a movement audience in the early 1960s.
Dispatches from “Anthropoid Ellis Island”: New York City’s More-Than-Human History
By Barrie Blatchford
New York City’s status as entrepot for millions of new Americans is one of the most well-known aspects of American history. But much less understood is that the city has long been the epicenter of the American (nonhuman) animal trade, a shadowy and little-studied subject that was nevertheless of enormous importance and pecuniary value.[1] Indeed, as New York City welcomed millions of new human immigrants in the decades after the Civil War, the increased mobility of the era also facilitated a rapidly expanding trade in animals. The creatures swept up in this trade were destined for often-dismal fates in zoos, circuses, travelling road shows, medical research laboratories, and as exotic pets — provided they survived the arduous trip to America in the first place.
The Sustainability Myth: An Interview with Melissa Checker
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, Gotham editor Katie Uva speaks to Melissa Checker about her recent book, The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice. In it, Checker examines and critiques current frameworks of sustainability in New York, where sustainability and economic development are often seen as goals that are mutually supporting. Checker argues that this belief leads to gentrification, deepens economic inequality, and even winds up worsening environmental conditions in some parts of the city.
Mastering Paradox: John Jay as a Slaveholding Abolitionist
By David N. Gellman
“Alexander Hamilton, Enslaver? New Research Says Yes” announced the New York Times in a November 2020 news story. A paper published online by Jessie Serfilippi, a researcher at the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site, uncovered striking new evidence to clarify long muddied waters about Hamilton’s personal connections to this deep-seated New York institution. Serfilippi’s dogged research is proof once again that even traditional archives still hold revelations.
The Unequal City: A Review of Racial Inequality in New York City since 1965
Reviewed by Kenneth S. Alyass
New York City is a nexus of racial and class inequality. The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent economic fallout has made this all too clear. Nearly one in four New Yorkers of color have lost their job since March. City institutions like the MTA and CUNY, which the majority-minority population of the city rely on in their daily lives, are facing apocalyptic budget cuts. And while the media’s attention is often on the abandonment of corporate offices in downtown Manhattan, thousands of small businesses owned by people of color — the lifeblood of neighborhoods — have shut down, usually for good.
Duties and Desires: The Brooklyn Eagle Cookbook, 1926
By Megan J. Elias
Community cookbooks were usually assembled by groups of women organized for a charitable purpose — restoring an old church, for example. These cookbooks can reveal many things about a community. By focusing on two sections in the book, “Household Hints” and “Tasty Dishes,” we can access the sensations of domestic life in Brooklyn in 1926, its rhythms and expectations.
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.
