“Young people are making their voices heard”: From Harlem’s Youth Movement in the 1930s and 1940s to DSA-NYC
By Mary Reynolds
The ongoing press scrum over New York’s 2021 mayoral election has obscured the down-ticket candidates in the June 22 primary races for the City’s fifty-one Council seats. These contests could be better bellwethers for the city’s future, and recall a little-known era of the city’s radical past.
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.
Contiguous Cloth: Textiles and the Slave Trade in New Netherland
By Carrie Anderson
Sometime in the fall of 1661 the Nieuw Nederlantse Indiaen docked in the harbor of New Amsterdam carrying documents and cargo from Curaçao, the Dutch colony that served as a central hub of the slave trade for both Dutch and Spanish colonies in the Americas. The skipper of the ship, Dirck Jansz van Oldenburg, carried with him a list of documents that were to be delivered to Pieter Stuyvesant (1612-1672), the director-general of New Netherland between 1647 and 1664.
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.
In the twelve months before January 2021, 2,225 people were buried on Hart Island, New York City’s public burial ground. At a time when the Island’s operations are undergoing the most significant organizational changes in its modern history, that’s the highest number of such burials recorded since the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic.
Today on the blog, Gotham editor Willie Mack speaks to filmmaker and geographer Brett Story about her book, Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America. Story reexamines the prison as a set of social relations which includes property, race, gender, and class across the urban landscape. In this way, Story demonstrates how carceral power is distributed outside of the prisons walls to include racially segregated communities, gentrifying urban spaces, and even mass transit.
“The presentation of the civic and commercial life of the city”: May King Van Rensselaer and the founding of the Museum of the City of New York
By Alena Buis
At the January 2, 1917 annual meeting of the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS), May King Van Rensselaer (1848-1925) delivered a passionate speech. Addressing the organization’s staid (and at that point startled) representatives she proclaimed: “I have been attending the meetings of the New-York Historical Society for nearly three years, and have not heard one new or advanced scientific thought, although many distinguished scholars have visited the city.”
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.”
In the Company of Pirates: New Amsterdam and the Atlantic World
By Timo McGregor
Preserved in an unassuming folder of Dutch colonial correspondence at the New York State Archives lies a vivid first-hand account of deceit, avarice, and violence in the seventeenth century Atlantic world. The scene, surprisingly, is not New Amsterdam or the Hudson Valley but the coast of modern-day Senegal. Here, in the winter of 1659, Abraham Velthuijsen witnessed a small but swashbuckling episode in the rise of Atlantic piracy and privateering.
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.
