The Panic of 1907: How J.P. Morgan Took Over Wall Street
By Richard A. Naclerio
One of the most influential shapers of New York City’s history is Wall Street. The economic, social, demographic, and political impact the banking industry has had on New York City is undeniable in its scope and power. However, Wall Street itself is influenced by men who have harnessed and bridled it throughout its textured history. The consolidation of financial power is almost always a harbinger for the rise or fall of New York’s future, and no event was more exemplary of this effect than the little-known Panic of 1907, and no man amassed so much power from it than J.P. Morgan.
Eva Tanguay's Racial and Gender Iconoclasticism and the Making of “Personality”
By Jonathan Goldman
When Dorothy Parker wanted to dunk on Billie Burke’s performance in the new Somerset Maugham play, she called Burke's acting “an impersonation of Eva Tanguay.”The reference may be obscure now, but it was not then. In January 1920, Tanguay had been a New York fixture and international celebrity for over fifteen years. Crowned “Queen of Vaudeville” by an infatuated press, from 1905 on she commanded her industry's highest salaries.
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.
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.
