Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry
Review by Emily Holloway
Maskiell argues that both social groups – the enslavers and the enslaved – built, maintained, and challenged their respective terms of community and belonging, whether through diplomacy or corporate mergers disguised as marriage arrangements or by sustaining regional networks of contacts to foment rebellion and resistance. The text at times navigates a vast geographic scale, but successfully keeps the narrative grounded in the roots of elite Dutch society in seventeenth century New Netherlands…The overall book project seeks to illuminate the incremental and cumulative changes along with the continuities linking Dutch colonial practices to English colonial institutions in the transition from New Netherlands to New York.
Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics
Review by Michael Woodsworth
Chisholm entered Congress as a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, a staunch defender of the Great Society, an advocate of expanded welfare benefits, and an unapologetic feminist. Despite her reputation as a “fiery idealist,” Curwood argues, she was also “ruthlessly pragmatic.” Chisholm was a coalition builder: she helped to found the Congressional Black Caucus as well as the National Women’s Political Caucus…. The 1972 presidential primary run remains Chisholm’s signature moment.… Chisholm may have been a transformational figure, but, as Curwood shows, she was also a product of her times. Her rise, accomplishments, and setbacks match, almost too perfectly, the arc of 20th-century American liberalism.
Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes
Review by M. Syd Rosen
Musical Migration and Imperial New York contends that by understanding how experimental music was enlisted in the American imperial project—indeed, by examining how such music co-produced this project—we might better understand the complicated ways in which creative experimentation is entangled with questions of identity and institutional power. The author is well aware of the scale of her task, which investigates how “state ambitions on a planetary scale” resulted in experimental music operating as “a force field of US global prestige and power.”
During her life, some members of the public drew connections between her antisemitism and her fervent anti-Zionism. But Woloch is right to separate these developments--there were Jews who rejected Zionism and many non-Jewish anti-Zionists who were not antisemitic. Gildersleeve pointed to her affection for Arab people and nations as the root of her anti-Zionism. This affection was, to be sure, inflected with Orientalism and the desire of some Progressives to remake Arab nations in the Protestant image. Still, she saw in Zionism the makings of bitter conflict in the Middle East. …Gildersleeve was active in the American Friends of the Middle East, a CIA-funded organization designed to cultivate closer ties between the U.S. and Middle East Arab nations… Digging deep into her controversial positions on Jews and Zionism, Woloch explains how the pieces of Gildersleeve’s worldview fit together.
The Pirate’s Wife: the Remarkable True Story of Sarah Kidd
Review by Kevin McDonald
…[S]he has produced a lively and entertaining biography of Sarah Kidd, from her arrival to the city through her multiple marriages and business dealings, with the book’s main focus on her relationship with William and the aftermath of his notorious demise. The narrative hits full sail when the privateer-turned-pirate returns from the Indian Ocean and Sarah becomes his accomplice in crime. Overall, the book is a stirring and fast paced yarn that helps reveal another layer of the Kidd saga, and more broadly suggests that the old axiom, “behind every great man is a great woman,” might be true even when dealing with pirates.
The Battle Nearer to Home: The Persistence of School Segregation in New York City
Review by Erika Kitzmiller
Despite its global reputation as a proudly diverse and progressive city, New York City public schools remain deeply segregated and inequitable. Bonastia covers two periods in which officials considered and local residents pushed for integration: from Brown v. Board (1954) to the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s and then from the early 2010s to the present. He asserts that he chose these two periods because they were the only times in recent history when there was any hope of enacting and implementing policies and programs to advance integration and equity.
Making Book on the Rez: A Hundred Years of Watershed Inquietude
Review by Gerard Koeppel
Lucy Sante’s Nineteen Reservoirs is an odd little book. “I would like simply to give an account of the human costs,” she concludes the Introduction, “an overview of the trade-offs, a summary of unintended consequences.”…Readers uninitiated in the history of New York’s water supply and watershed-dweller psychosis will find a useful if derivative primer.
A Seat at the Table: LGBTQ Representation in New York Politics, Exhibit at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives
Reviewed by Danica Stompor
The beating heart of Gourjon-Bieltvedt and Petrus’s exhibit is turning these testimonies into a fervent call to young people for optimism and for action…It has been far from a linear path, but for many people my age and younger, the past decades have featured an enormous increase in visibility and significant legal wins for queer people, particularly in New York. A Seat at the Table inserts us into the lives and tactics of the city’s elected officials who made these gains possible while resisting the attitude that progress is inevitable…A Seat at the Table is attuned to the small moments that transform residents into leaders.
Sojourner Truth: How the Enslaved Woman of a Dutch-New York Family Became an Icon of America’s Black Liberation Movement
By Jerome Dewulf
…[A]ssisting in the recruitment of Black troops for the Union Army… she had an audience with President Lincoln in 1864… in Washington, D.C., Truth challenged the de facto segregation in the city’s transportation system by insisting on her right to take a seat on streetcars. With her decision to use civil disobedience as a strategy to challenge segregation in public transportation, Truth anticipated Rosa Parks by almost a century. However, Truth could also be an uncomfortable voice within her own community. For instance, when Douglass defended the use of violence in the fight for racial justice at a meeting in 1852, she interrupted him with the words “Frederick, is God gone?” and, in 1867, she provocatively stated that “if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs... the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”
Placemaker and Displacer: How Transit Shaped New York
By Polly Desjarlais
Before 1950, a vibrant multi-ethnic, residential neighborhood known as Little Syria existed at the very bottom of Manhattan. A concentration of immigrants from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine (countries collectively known then as Greater Syria) settled on Lower Washington Street beginning in the 1880s… As in the case of Chinatown, the transit connections between Little Syria and Brooklyn became instrumental in the community’s transplantation and survival… nearly the whole neighborhood was razed in the 1940s to make way for the construction of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel (Hugh L. Carey Tunnel). . . In the case of Little Syria, the city’s transportation demands both displaced people and provided a means of resettlement in other parts of the city.
