In 1934, New York’s Museum of Modern Art staged a major exhibition of ball bearings, airplane propellers, pots and pans, cocktail tumblers, petri dishes, protractors, and other machine parts and products. The exhibition, titled Machine Art, explored these ordinary objects as works of modern art, teaching museumgoers about the nature of beauty and value in the era of mass production.

Based on more than a decade of research, Making a Global Immigrant Neighborhood charts the evolution of Sunset Park--with a densely concentrated working-poor and racially diverse immigrant population--from the late 1960s to its current status as one of New York City's most vibrant neighborhoods. 

Tarry Hum shows how processes of globalization, such as shifts in low-wage labor markets and immigration patterns, shaped the neighborhood. She explains why Sunset Park's future now depends on Asian and Latino immigrant collaborations in advancing common interests in community building, civic engagement, entrepreneurialism, and sustainability planning. She shows, too, how residents' responses to urban development policies and projects and the capital represented by local institutions and banks foster community activism. 

Hum pays close attention to the complex social, political, and spatial dynamics that forge a community and create new models of leadership as well as coalitions. The evolution of Sunset Park so astutely depicted in this book suggests new avenues for studying urban change and community development.

Making Connections maps new territory in the field of psychology. The essays in this volume are “a series of exercises en route to a new psychology of adolescence and women…[and] part of a process that they also describe: of changing a tradition by including girls’ voices, of listening to girls and asking again about the meaning of self, relationship, and morality—concepts central to any psychology of human development… Each essay originated with a question that arose or became clarified in the experience of the research. No attempt has been made to unify these essays or to arrive at a central thesis, beyond the common intention to listen for the ways in which girls orchestrate themes of connection and separation and concerns about care and justice in speaking about themselves, about their relationships, and about experiences of conflict…

“When Women’s Studies is joined with the study of girls development it becomes clearer why adolescence is a critical time in girls’ lives—a time when girls are in danger of losing their voices and thus losing connection with others, and also a time when girls, gaining voice and knowledge, are in danger of knowing the unseen and speaking the unspoken and thus losing connection with what is commonly taken to be ‘reality.’ This crisis of connection in girls’ lives at adolescence links the psychology of women with the most basic questions about the nature of relationships and the definition of reality. Girls questions about relationships and about reality, however, also tug at women’s silences.”

A compelling biography of an important eyewitness to the twentieth century.

Marie Syrkin’s life spanned ninety years of the twentieth century, 1899–1989. As a polemical journalist, socialist Zionist, poet, educator, literary critic, translator, and idiosyncratic feminist, she was an eyewitness to and reporter on most of the major events in America, Israel, and Europe. Beautiful as well as brilliant, she had a rich personal life as a lover, wife, mother, and friend. During her lifetime Syrkin’s name was widely recognized in the world of Jewish life and letters. Yet, since Syrkin’s death, recognition of her name is no longer quite so immediate. Carole S. Kessner’s biography restores Syrkin’s fascinating life and legacy for a new generation.
 

Among all the fifty-six men who have served as New York’s governor, none was more complicated, self-righteous, pugilistic, and exasperating than Mario Cuomo.

As governor, Mario Cuomo is remembered most for his advocacy of the “personally-opposed-but” position on abortion that led to confrontations with Catholic Church hierarchy, and for dithering about his presidential ambitions, that led the media to dub him the “Hamlet on the Hudson.” His political style reminded many of Machiavelli; Cuomo styled himself a successor to St. Thomas More.

In this political profile, George J. Marlin sets the record straight on Mario Cuomo.

Marlin traces Cuomo’s political rise and documents how and why he abandoned his public opposition to abortion to be elected New York’s chief executive.

In great detail, Marlin describes the protracted conflict between Cuomo and his church on abortion and refutes the governor’s claim that his “position on abortion is absolutely theologically sound.”

Marlin critiques Cuomo’s famous 1984 Democratic convention speech as nothing more than the usual high-toned partisan liberal bromides that offered little, if anything, that hadn’t been touted by his party for half a century.

The book also uncovers New York State’s fiscal, economic, and social decline during Cuomo’s 12 years as governor. It explains why voters repudiated Cuomo’s version of a welfare state when he sought a fourth term in 1994 and why, in the words of his son, Governor Andrew Cuomo, his father was “more accomplished as a speech-giver than as a governor.”

Marlin skillfully separates the Cuomo “Public Intellectual” myth from the political man.


Mario Cuomo, three times Governor of New York, an eloquent hard edged Catholic from Queens, dominated not only his home state but national liberal politics in the age of Reagan. Whether the subject was police or theology, Cuomo rhetorically overpowered the reporters who covered him.  But he’s finally met his match in George Marlin’s Mario Cuomo The Myth and the Man. Marlin’s extraordinary equipment; a former candidate for Mayor of N.Y.C., former executive director of the New York and New Jersey Port Authority, author of books on Catholic voters and the Archbishops of New York, has made him the ideal author of what’s sure to be seen as the definitive political biography of Mario Cuomo. — Fred Siegel, Author, The Prince of the City:  Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life and The Future Once Happened Here:  New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities.

“It’s easy to forget what an important and fascinating figure Mario Cuomo was during New York’s raucous political heyday of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, when the likes of Hugh Carey, Ed Koch, Al D’Amato, and Rudy Giuliani strode the political stage. Thankfully, George Marlin’s wonderful new Cuomo biography will help everyone remember both the good and bad of the remarkable man who served three terms as governor, turned down a seat on the Supreme Court and rejected the chance to run for President. Here are both Cuomo’s successes and failures — and of the latter there were many.  An important work that helps restore our collective memory. — Fredric U. Dicker, the New York Post’s longtime state editor and a TV and radio commentator, covered six governors during 40 years at the state Capitol in Albany.

George Marlin is virtually peerless in blending high principle with knowledge of street-level politics and the nuts-and-bolts of otherwise mundane governance to produce readable, yet deeply insightful, social and political portraits. Mario Cuomo: The Myth and the Man, examines in fine detail one of one of New York state’s most consequential, if also deeply flawed, 20th-century gubernatorial incumbencies. Plus, readers get a bonus: Insight into what shaped the career of Mario Cuomo’s Democratic superstar son, Andrew. Marlin has been in the trenches himself and thus can separate blarney from beefsteak – which this fine volume once again demonstrates. —Bob McManus, Contributing Editor, The City Journal, was the New York Post’s Editorial Page Editor (2000-2013), and The Albany Times Union’s Executive City Editor (1975-1981).

“George Marlin not only captures the political life and journey of Mario Cuomo, but details his policy approach that led to the near demise of the Empire State. Fortunately, the Conservative Party of New York was there to carry the torch and provide the margin of victory for George Pataki ending the senior Cuomo’s reign.” —Michael Long, State Chairman, Conservative Party of New York (1988-2019)
 
“For both better and worse, Mario Cuomo was the quintessential American Catholic politician of an entire postwar generation: ambitious, brilliant, articulate, serious about his faith, and flexible in how and where he applied it. George Marlin is a writer of considerable skill, and he uses here it to produce a provocative, absorbing portrait of the man and his career. —Francis X. Maier, Senior Fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center
 

John D’Emilio is one of the leading historians of his generation and a pioneering figure in the field of LGBTQ history. At times his life has been seemingly at odds with his upbringing. How does a boy from an Italian immigrant family in which everyone unfailingly went to confession and Sunday Mass become a lapsed Catholic? How does a family who worshipped Senator Joseph McCarthy and supported Richard Nixon produce an antiwar activist and pacifist? How does a family in which the word divorce was never spoken raise a son who comes to explore the hidden gay sexual underworld of New York City?

Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood is D’Emilio’s coming-of-age story in which he takes readers from his working-class Bronx neighborhood to an elite Jesuit high school in Manhattan to Columbia University and the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s. He shares his personal experiences of growing up in a conservative, tight-knit, multigenerational family, how he went from considering entering the priesthood to losing his faith and coming to terms with his same-sex desires. Throughout, D’Emilio outlines his complicated relationship with his family while showing how his passion for activism influenced his decision to use research, writing, and teaching to build a strong LGBTQ movement.

This is not just John D’Emilio’s personal story; it opens a window into how the conformist baby boom decade of the 1950s transformed into the tumultuous years of radical social movements and widespread protest during the 1960s. It is the story of what happens when different cultures and values collide and the tensions and possibilities for personal discovery and growth that emerge. Intimate and honest, D’Emilio’s story will resonate with anyone who has had to chart their own path in a world they did not expect to find.

Miriam Zadek shares her story in this memoir that documents her experiences growing up in a New York Jewish family with both deaf and hearing members from the 1930s through World War II and beyond. Her story is personal and reflective, revealing the sometimes complex and heart-rending dynamics within her family and her community. Through brief and evocative vignettes, Zadek relates her memories of family life, capturing the innocence of childhood, the confusion of adolescence, and then progressing through adulthood. Her recollections evolve from a childlike observance to awareness, pain, and understanding as she matures. Throughout this journey, the author presents a narrative of historical and cultural importance centered on her personal account of the lives of deaf and hearing Jewish people in the mid-twentieth century.

       The prevailing ideological movements of the time permeate her family life. Zadek reveals the traumatic impact of eugenics and the fears surrounding the genetic transmission of deafness. She considers the effects of adhering to the oral method of communication in her home when sign language could have given her family the ability to interact with each other more fully. In this environment, Zadek became an astute communicator and learned to adapt to both the hearing and the deaf world, where she was known as “Miriam Hearing Sister.” Her memoir is an elegant literary work that offers an understanding of how biases and stigmas resonate and evolve, and it showcases her loving family of strong women who pushed against stereotypes and have thrived across generations.

The development of public transit is an integral part of both business and urban history in late nineteenth-century America. The author begins this study in 1880, when public transportation in large American cities was provided by numerous, competing horse-car companies with little or no public control of operation. By 1912, when the study concludes, a monopoly in each city operated a coordinated network of electric-powered streetcars and, in the largest cities, subways, which were regulated by city and state agencies. The history of transit development reflects two dominant themes: the constant pressure of rapid growth in city population and area and the requirements of the technology developed to service that growth.

The case studies here include three of the four cites that had rapid transit during this period. Each case study examines, first, the mechanization of surface lines and, second, the implementation of rapid transit. New York requires an additional chapter on steam-powered, elevated railroads, for early population growth there required rapid transit before the invention of electric technology. Urban transit enterprise is viewed within a clear and familiar pattern of evolution—the pattern of the last half of the nineteenth century, when industries with expanding markets and complex, costly processes of production and distribution adopted new strategy and structure, administered by a new class of professional managers.

Through archival work and storytelling, Musical Migration and Imperial New York revises many inherited narratives about experimental music and art in postwar New York.

From the urban street level of music clubs and arts institutions to the world-making routes of global migration and exchange, this book redraws the map of experimental art to reveal the imperial dynamics and citizenship struggles that continue to shape music in the United States.

Beginning with the material conditions of power that structured the cityscape of New York in the early Cold War years, Brigid Cohen looks at a wide range of artistic practices (concert music, electronic music, jazz, performance art) and actors (Edgard Varèse, Charles Mingus, Yoko Ono, and Fluxus founder George Maciunas) as they experimented with new modes of creativity. Cohen links them with other migrant creators vital to the city’s postwar culture boom, creators whose stories have seldom been told (Halim El-Dabh, Michiko Toyama, Vladimir Ussachevsky). She also gives sustained and serious treatment to the work of Yoko Ono, something long overdue in music scholarship. Musical Migration and Imperial New York is indispensable reading, offering a new understanding of global avant-gardes and American experimental music as well as the contrasting feelings of belonging and exclusion on which they were built.

An insightful look at how avant-garde musicians of the postwar period in New York explored the philosophical dimensions of music’s ineffability.
 
The Musician as Philosopher explores the philosophical thought of avant-garde musicians in postwar New York: David Tudor, Ornette Coleman, the Velvet Underground, Alice Coltrane, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell. It contends that these musicians—all of whom are understudied and none of whom are traditionally taken to be composers—not only challenged the rules by which music is written and practiced but also confounded and reconfigured gendered and racialized expectations for what critics took to be legitimate forms of musical sound. From a broad historical perspective, their arresting music electrified a widely recognized social tendency of the 1960s: a simultaneous affirmation and crisis of the modern self.