Free from the Stain: New York’s Free Produce Stores
By Charline Jao
American proponents of free produce saw clearly the connection between commercial consumption and the institution of slavery, seeking to overthrow what Frances Harper called slavery’s “commercial throne.” Not only did they refuse to buy items that came from southern plantations, they also sought to create new networks of trade, labor, and production. Ruggles, for instance, did not only secure “free” butter from Goshen, New York for his customers, he also employed formerly enslaved men like Samuel Ringgold Ward and Isaiah Harper Ward. Advocates of free produce set out on expeditions to find alternatives to sugar, reached out to farmers and merchants, did speaking tours in England, and opened stores where they could proudly state – as Elizabeth Kent in Pennsylvania did – that they had “EVERYTHING FOR SALE EXCEPTS PRINCIPLES!!”
An Excerpt from Making Long Island: A History of Growth and the American Dream
By Lawrence R. Samuel
Beginning in the Roaring Twenties, Wall Street money looked eastward to generate wealth from a burgeoning land boom. After the Great Depression and World War II, Long Island—Nassau and Suffolk Counties—emerged as the site of the quintessential postwar American suburb, Levittown. Levittown and its spinoff suburban communities served as a primary symbol of the American dream through affordable home ownership for the predominantly White middle class, propelling the national mythology steeped in success, financial security, upward mobility, and consumerism. Starting in the 1960s, however, the dream began to dissolve, as the postwar economic engine ran out of steam and Long Island became as much urban as suburban. Over the course of these decades, the island evolved over the decades and largely detached itself from New York City to become a self-sustaining entity with its own challenges, exclusions and triumphs.
The Eight tells the story of the Lemmon slave case, a dramatic legal battle over the freedom of eight enslaved people who were brought to New York City while sailing from Virginia to Texas, at which point New York abolitionists initiated a freedom suit on their behalf. The eight-year legal saga that followed reflected escalating political tensions over the fate of American slavery and highlighted the legal contradictions that complicated a half-slave, half-free nation.
The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront
Review By Tom Greenland
Professor Cisco Bradley’s book, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront, is product of a decade-long investigation into the creative music scene(s) hovering around Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood from 1988 to 2014, documenting its ostensible rise and fall. The narrative pits struggling DIY artists against the 2005 rezoning and consequent gentrification that brought economic sea changes on the area, a battle between art and capitalism, with capitalism the clear victor.
Black Loyalists in the Evacuation of New York City, 1783
By L. Goulet and Mary Tsaltas-Ottomanelli
From 1776, the city stood as the stronghold of British operations in the thirteen colonies. The last British officials departed on November 25, ending their seven-year occupation of the city. We remember this event today as Evacuation Day. It was once a celebrated holiday but has since been largely forgotten by the public. Public commemorations primarily concentrated on the return of Patriot forces. It is crucial to move beyond the narrow focus and highlight the importance of expanding public memory to include the experiences of Loyalists who evacuated and the thousands of Black Loyalists who sought their freedom.
In the midst of the “Roaring ‘20’s,” the Café Lafayette, in the heart of Greenwich Village, was a world apart from Staten Island’s truck farms, ocean beaches, and sleepy villages — despite being just half an hour away by ferry. If anything connects the two places — and has memorialized them—it is the work of Dawn Powell.
Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York
Review By Emily Holloway
Set from the original founding of the NYPD in 1845 and concluding around the first World War, Guariglia’s book situates the NYPD as a medium of American imperial ambition and statecraft. Police and the Empire City is not merely a history of the country’s largest and most influential police department; it also positions the NYPD as a repository of scientific knowledge about race, gender, and sexuality that is mobilized and iterated to assert state authority and preserve order.
The “Puerto Rican Problem” in Postwar New York City
Review By Kenneth M. Donovan
Perhaps most significantly, the book sheds light on how ideas about Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rico itself were constructed and incorporated into public policy and popular culture. According to Meléndez, those ideas have had staying power. As the island of Puerto Rico faces ongoing challenges in the present, from crippling debt to the privatization of its electric power, it seems that, to quote Melendez, “the ‘Puerto Rican Problem’ has not disappeared. It has simply changed shape.”
The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever
Review By Miriam Grotte-Jacobs
Immortalized by writers like Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, the Slip dates back to the seventeenth century, a liminal site between land and water that maintained, as Peiffer argues, an altogether distinct sensibility; a place apart from the rest of Manhattan that offered artistic alternatives to its inhabitants with major consequences for the trajectory of modernism and postmodernism in the United States. A counternarrative to accounts of the New York art world that center around Cedar Tavern and Max’s Kansas City, Peiffer offers a close reading of a different New York and the artistic community it enabled.
Mobilizing the Metropolis: How the Port Authority Built New York
Review by Elizabeth M. Marcello and Gail Radford
The New York City metropolitan area boasts an impressive infrastructural network that moves people, trains, motor vehicles, freight, ships, and airplanes. At the center of this network is the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the subject of Philip Mark Plotch and Jen Nelles’s Mobilizing the Metropolis, which they offer as a “reflective history” of this particular agency, but also as a series of “lessons” for other agencies around the country built on the public authority model.
