Results by title

413 books match the query 'New York' and 23 start with b

cover of Backroom Bargaining: Racketeering and Rebellion in New York City's Labor Unions

Backroom Bargaining

Racketeering and Rebellion in New York City's Labor Unions

Jane LaTour

University of Illinois Press, 2026

Organized crime figures and their minions honeycombed unions while leadership instituted nepotism, salary padding, and other practices that undermined the well-being of the rank and file. But in New York City, groups of union members and their legal allies waged a years-long struggle against corruption and for better working conditions. Jane LaTour combines rich oral histories with research to take readers into the construction sites, power plants, and Merchant Marine ships where the dramas played out. Dissidents risked their livelihoods for a variety of reasons, from practical concerns like job security and safety to larger ideas like union democracy. LaTour examines the factors that allowed unchecked corruption and kept unions from living up to their potential. But she also tells the eyewitness stories of solidarity and worker spirit that fueled the fight to retake labor power. A rare history of union corruption, Backroom Bargaining shines a light on worker campaigns to uphold fairness and equity in the workplace.
[more]
cover of Bagpipe Brothers: The FDNY Band's True Story of Tragedy, Mourning, and Recovery

Bagpipe Brothers

The FDNY Band's True Story of Tragedy, Mourning, and Recovery

Kerry Sheridan

Rutgers University Press, 2004

After the 9/11 World Trade Center terrorist attacks, New York City's Emerald Society Bagpipe Band of firefighter-musicians took out their instruments and prepared to bury their dead--343 brothers in duty and in blood. Many firefighters alternated between playing their instruments at funerals and digging for the missing in the rubble of Ground Zero. The Irish American tradition of funeral bagpiping became the sound of mourning for an entire nation.

Bagpipe Brothers tells the unforgettable story of four firefighters in the band, who struggled to bring peace to their families and themselves while searching for the dead, coping with the endless round of funerals, and rethinking the meaning of faith. Their experiences illustrate the grief and recovery of the nation in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.

Kerry Sheridan has written the first book to cover the ordeal of the massive number of funerals, the importance of recovering bodies in Irish American culture, and the bagpiping ritual, both traditional and modern.
 
[more]
cover of Banquet at Delmonico's: The Gilded Age and the Triumph of Evolution in America

Banquet at Delmonico's

The Gilded Age and the Triumph of Evolution in America

Barry Werth

University of Chicago Press, 2011

In Banquet at Delmonico’s, Barry Werth draws readers inside the circle of intellectuals, scientists, politicians, businessmen, and clergymen who brought Charles Darwin’s controversial ideas to post-Civil-War America. Each chapter is dedicated to a crucial intellectual encounter, culminating with an exclusive farewell dinner held in English philosopher Herbert Spencer’s honor at the venerable New York restaurant Delmonico’s in 1882. In this thought-provoking and nuanced account, Werth firmly situates social Darwinism in the context of the Gilded Age. Banquet at Delmonico’s is social history at its finest.

[more]
cover of Bargaining for Brooklyn: Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City

Bargaining for Brooklyn

Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City

Nicole P. Marwell

University of Chicago Press, 2007

When middle-class residents fled American cities in the 1960s and 1970s, government services and investment capital left too. Countless urban neighborhoods thus entered phases of precipitous decline, prompting the creation of community-based organizations that sought to bring direly needed resources back to the inner city. Today there are tens of thousands of these CBOs—private nonprofit groups that work diligently within tight budgets to give assistance and opportunity to our most vulnerable citizens by providing services such as housing, child care, and legal aid.

Through ethnographic fieldwork at eight CBOs in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick, Nicole P. Marwell discovered that the complex and contentious relationships these groups form with larger economic and political institutions outside the neighborhood have a huge and unexamined impact on the lives of the poor. Most studies of urban poverty focus on individuals or families, but Bargaining for Brooklyn widens the lens, examining the organizations whose actions and decisions collectively drive urban life.
[more]
cover of Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation

Becoming New Yorkers

Ethnographies of the New Second Generation

Philip Kasinitz

Russell Sage Foundation, 2004

More than half of New Yorkers under the age of eighteen are the children of immigrants. This second generation shares with previous waves of immigrant youth the experience of attempting to reconcile their cultural heritage with American society. In Becoming New Yorkers, noted social scientists Philip Kasinitz, John Mollenkopf, and Mary Waters bring together in-depth ethnographies of some of New York's largest immigrant populations to assess the experience of the new second generation and to explore the ways in which they are changing the fabric of American culture. Becoming New Yorkers looks at the experience of specific immigrant groups, with regard to education, jobs, and community life. Exploring immigrant education, Nancy López shows how teachers' low expectations of Dominican males often translate into lower graduation rates for boys than for girls. In the labor market, Dae Young Kim finds that Koreans, young and old alike, believe the second generation should use the opportunities provided by their parents' small business success to pursue less arduous, more rewarding work than their parents. Analyzing civic life, Amy Forester profiles how the high-ranking members of a predominantly black labor union, who came of age fighting for civil rights in the 1960s, adjust to an increasingly large Caribbean membership that sees the leaders not as pioneers but as the old-guard establishment. In a revealing look at how the second-generation views itself, Sherry Ann Butterfield and Aviva Zeltzer-Zubida point out that black West Indian and Russian Jewish immigrants often must choose whether to identify themselves alongside those with similar skin color or to differentiate themselves from both native blacks and whites based on their unique heritage. Like many other groups studied here, these two groups experience race as a fluid, situational category that matters in some contexts but is irrelevant in others. As immigrants move out of gateway cities and into the rest of the country, America will increasingly look like the multicultural society vividly described in Becoming New Yorkers. This insightful work paints a vibrant picture of the experience of second generation Americans as they adjust to American society and help to shape its future.
[more]
cover of Beekmantown, New York: Forest Frontier to Farm Community

Beekmantown, New York

Forest Frontier to Farm Community

By Philip L. White

University of Texas Press, 1979

This volume reports in detail how a particular portion of the American wilderness developed into a settled farming community. To fully comprehend the history of the American people in the early national period, an understanding of this transformation from forest to community—and the pattern of life within such communities where the vast majority of the people live—is essential.

Three major conclusions emerge from Philip L. White's study of Beekmantown, New York. First, the economic advantages of the frontier attracted a first generation of settlers relatively high in social and economic status, but the disappearance of frontier conditions brought a second generation of settlers appreciably lower in status. Second, White rejects the romantic notion that the frontier fostered equality and argues instead that the frontier's economic opportunities fostered inequality. Finally, in contrast to revisionist arguments, he affirms that in Beekmantown the Jacksonian period does indeed warrant characterization as the era of the "common man."

This book represents a model in community history: the narrative is full of human interest; the scholarship is prodigious; the applications are universal.

[more]
cover of Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914

Beer and Revolution

The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880-1914

Tom Goyens

University of Illinois Press, 2007

Understanding an infamous political movement's grounding in festivity and defiance

Beer and Revolution examines the rollicking life and times of German immigrant anarchists in New York City from 1880 to 1914. Offering a new approach to an often misunderstood political movement, Tom Goyens puts a human face on anarchism and reveals a dedication less to bombs than to beer halls and saloons where political meetings, public lectures, discussion circles, fundraising events, and theater groups were held.

Goyens brings to life the fascinating relationship between social space and politics by examining how the intersection of political ideals, entertainment, and social activism embodied anarchism not as an abstract idea, but as a chosen lifestyle for thousands of women and men. He shows how anarchist social gatherings were themselves events of defiance and resistance that aimed at establishing anarchism as an alternative lifestyle through the combination of German working-class conviviality and a dedication to the principle that coercive authority was not only unnecessary, but actually damaging to full and free human development as well. Goyens also explores the broader circumstances in both the United States and Germany that served as catalysts for the emergence of anarchism in urban America and how anarchist activism was hampered by police surveillance, ethnic insularity, and a widening gulf between the anarchists' message and the majority of American workers.

[more]
cover of Before Pictures

Before Pictures

Douglas Crimp

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Douglas Crimp is the rare art critic whose work profoundly influenced a generation of artists. He is best known for his work with the “Pictures Generation”—the very name of which Crimp coined to define the work of artists like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman who appropriated images from mass culture to carry out a subversive critique. But while his influence is widely recognized, we know little about Crimp’s own formative experiences before “Pictures.”

Before Pictures tells the story of Crimp’s life as a young gay man and art critic in New York City during the late 1960s through the turbulent 1970s. Crimp participated in all of what made the city so stimulating in that vibrant decade. The details of his professional and personal life are interwoven with this the particularly rich history of New York City at that time, producing a vivid portrait of both the critic and his adopted city. The book begins with his escape from his hometown in Idaho, and we quickly find Crimp writing criticism for ArtNews while working at the Guggenheim—where, as a young curatorial assistant, he was one of the few to see Daniel Buren’s Peinture-Sculpture before it was removed amid cries of institutional censorship. We also travel to the Chelsea Hotel (where Crimp helped the down-on-his-luck couturier Charles James organize his papers) through to his days as a cinephile and balletomane to the founding of the art journal October, where he remained a central figure for many years. As he was developing his reputation as a critic, he was also partaking of the New York night life, from drugs and late nights alongside the Warhol crowd at the Max’s Kansas City to discos, roller-skating, and casual sex with famous (and not-so-famous) men. As AIDS began to ravage the closely linked art and gay communities, Crimp eventually turned his attention to activism dedicated to rethinking AIDS.

Part biography and part cultural history, Before Pictures is a courageous account of an exceptional period in both Crimp’s life and the life of New York City. At the same time, it offers a deeply personal and engaging point of entry into important issues in contemporary art.
 
[more]
cover of Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963

Between You and Me

Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963

Gavin Butt

Duke University Press, 2005

In the decades preceding the Stonewall riots—in the wake of the 1948 publication of Alfred Kinsey’s controversial report on male sexuality and in the midst of a cold war culture of suspicion and paranoia—discussions of homosexuality within the New York art world necessarily circulated via gossip and rumor. Between You and Me explores this informal, everyday talk and how it shaped artists’ lives, their work, and its reception. Revealing the “trivial” and “unserious” aspects of the postwar art scene as key to understanding queer subjectivity, Gavin Butt argues for a richer, more expansive concept of historical evidence, one that supplements the verifiable facts of traditional historical narrative with the gossipy fictions of sexual curiosity.

Focusing on the period from 1948 to 1963, Butt draws on the accusations and denials of homosexuality that appeared in the popular press, on early homophile publications such as One and the Mattachine Review, and on biographies, autobiographies, and interviews. In a stunning exposition of Larry Rivers’s work, he shows how Rivers incorporated gossip into his paintings, just as his friend and lover Frank O’Hara worked it into his poetry. He describes how the stories about Andy Warhol being too “swish” to be taken seriously as an artist changed following his breakthrough success, reconstructing him as an asexual dandy. Butt also speculates on the meanings surrounding a MoMA curator’s refusal in 1958 to buy Jasper Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts on the grounds that it was too scandalous for the museum to acquire. Between You and Me sheds new light on a pivotal moment in American cultural production as it signals new directions for art history.

[more]
cover of Beyond Ridiculous: Making Gay Theatre with Charles Busch in 1980s New York

Beyond Ridiculous

Making Gay Theatre with Charles Busch in 1980s New York

Kenneth Elliott

University of Iowa Press, 2023

Beyond Ridiculous tells the story of Theatre-in-Limbo, a downtown band of actors formed in 1984 by director Kenneth Elliott and playwright and drag legend Charles Busch. They launched Vampire Lesbians of Sodom at the Limbo Lounge, a raffish club in the fringes of the East Village, but it would later become the longest-running non-musical in off-Broadway history. From 1984 to 1991, Busch starred in eight Limbo productions, always in outrageously fabulous drag.

In Beyond Ridiculous, Elliott narrates in first-person the company’s Cinderella tale of fun, heartbreak, and dishy drama. At the center of the book is a young Charles Busch, an unforgettable personality fighting to be seen, be heard, and express his unique style as a writer-performer in plays such as Psycho Beach Party and The Lady in Question. The tragedy of AIDS among treasured friends in the company, the struggle for mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ+ theatre during the reign of President Ronald Reagan, and the exploration of new ways of being a gay theatre artist make the book a bittersweet and joyous ride.
[more]
cover of Black Women and Politics in New York City

Black Women and Politics in New York City

Julie A. Gallagher

University of Illinois Press, 2014

An essential contribution to twentieth-century political history, Black Women and Politics in New York City documents African American women in New York City fighting for justice, civil rights, and equality in the turbulent world of formal politics from the suffrage and women's rights movements to the feminist era of the 1970s.

Historian and human rights activist Julie A. Gallagher deftly examines how race, gender, and the structure of the state itself shape outcomes, and exposes the layers of power and discrimination at work in American society. She combines her analysis with a look at the career of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress and the first to run for president on a national party ticket. In so doing, she rewrites twentieth-century women's history and the dominant narrative arcs of feminist history that hitherto ignored African American women and their accomplishments.

[more]
cover of Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters: Black Women, Voice, and the Musical Stage

Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters

Black Women, Voice, and the Musical Stage

Masi Asare

Duke University Press, 2024

In Blues Mamas and Broadway Belters, songwriter, scholar, and dramatist Masi Asare explores the singing practice of black women singers in US musical theatre between 1900 and 1970. Asare shows how a vanguard of black women singers including Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Pearl Bailey, Juanita Hall, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Diahann Carroll, and Leslie Uggams created a lineage of highly trained and effective voice teachers whose sound and vocal techniques continue to be heard today. Challenging pervasive narratives that these and other black women possessed “untrained” voices, Asare theorizes singing as a form of sonic citational practice—how the sound of the teacher’s voice lives on in the student’s singing. From vaudeville-blues shouters, black torch singers, and character actresses to nightclub vocalists and Broadway glamour girls, Asare locates black women of the musical stage in the context of historical voice pedagogy. She invites readers not only to study these singers, but to study with them—taking seriously what they and their contemporaries have taught about the voice. Ultimately, Asare speaks to the need to feel and hear the racial history in contemporary musical theatre.
[more]
cover of Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged

Bound by Creativity

How Contemporary Art Is Created and Judged

Hannah Wohl

University of Chicago Press, 2021

What is creativity? While our traditional view of creative work might lead us to think of artists as solitary visionaries, the creative process is profoundly influenced by social interactions even when artists work alone. Sociologist Hannah Wohl draws on more than one hundred interviews and two years of ethnographic research in the New York contemporary art market to develop a rich sociological perspective of creativity. From inside the studio, we see how artists experiment with new ideas and decide which works to abandon, destroy, put into storage, or exhibit. Wohl then transports readers into the art world, where we discover how artists’ understandings of their work are shaped through interactions in studio visits, galleries, international art fairs, and collectors’ homes.
 
Bound by Creativity reveals how artists develop conceptions of their distinctive creative visions through experimentation and social interactions. Ultimately, we come to appreciate how judgment is integral to the creative process, both resulting in the creation of original works while also limiting an artist’s ability to break new ground. Exploring creativity through the lens of judgment sheds new light on the production of cultural objects, markets, and prestige. 
[more]
cover of Breaks in the Air: The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City

Breaks in the Air

The Birth of Rap Radio in New York City

John Klaess

Duke University Press, 2022

In Breaks in the Air John Klaess tells the story of rap’s emergence on New York City’s airwaves by examining how artists and broadcasters adapted hip hop’s performance culture to radio. Initially, artists and DJs brought their live practice to radio by buying time on low-bandwidth community stations and building new communities around their shows. Later, stations owned by New York’s African American elite, such as WBLS, reluctantly began airing rap even as they pursued a sound rooted in respectability, urban sophistication, and polish. At the same time, large commercial stations like WRKS programmed rap once it became clear that the music attracted a demographic that was valuable to advertisers. Moving between intimate portraits of single radio shows and broader examinations of the legal, financial, cultural, and political forces that indelibly shaped the sound of rap radio, Klaess shows how early rap radio provides a lens through which to better understand the development of rap music as well as the intertwined histories of sounds, institutions, communities, and legal formations that converged in the post-Civil Rights era.
[more]
cover of Broadway Rhythm: Imaging the City in Song

Broadway Rhythm

Imaging the City in Song

Dominic Symonds

University of Michigan Press, 2017

Broadway Rhythm is a guide to Manhattan like nothing you've ever read. Author Dominic Symonds calls it a performance cartography, and argues that the city of New York maps its iconicity in the music of the Broadway songbook. A series of walking tours takes the reader through the landscape of Manhattan, clambering over rooftops, riding the subway, and flying over skyscrapers. Symonds argues that Broadway's songs can themselves be used as maps to better understand the city though identifiable patterns in the visual graphics of the score, the auditory experience of the music, and the embodied articulation of performance, recognizing in all of these patterns, corollaries inscribed in the terrain, geography, and architecture of the city.

Through musicological analyses of works by Gershwin, Bernstein, Copland, Sondheim and others, the author proposes that performance cartography is a versatile methodology for urban theory, and establishes a methodological approach that uses the idea of the map in three ways: as an impetus, a metaphor, and a tool for exploring the city.

 
[more]
cover of Bronx Accent: A Literary and Pictorial History of the Borough

Bronx Accent

A Literary and Pictorial History of the Borough

Ultan, Lloyd

Rutgers University Press, 2000

For the last three hundred years, and through all its social and economic transformations, The Bronx has been a major literary center that many prominent writers have called home.

Bringing together a variety of past literary figures as well as emerging talents, this comprehensive book captures the Zeitgeist of the neighborhood through the eyes of its writers. Included are selections from the writings of Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain, James Baldwin, James Fenimore Cooper, Tom Wolfe, Herman Wouk, Theodore Dreiser, Washington Irving, Clifford Odets, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Edgar Allan Poe, Chaim Potok, Kate Simon, Leon Trotsky, and Sholem Aleichem.

Lloyd Ultan and Barbara Unger place the literature of these and other writers in historical context and reproduce one hundred vintage photographs that bring the writings to life. Filtered through the imaginations of authors of different times, ethnic groups, social classes, and literary styles, the borough of The Bronx emerges not only as a shaper of destinies and lives, but as an important literary mecca.
[more]
cover of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism

Brooklyn Odyssey

My Journey out of Hasidism

Zalman Newfield

Temple University Press, 2026

Growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn as a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Orthodox Jewish community, Zalman Newfield was raised in an atmosphere of strict gender segregation, rigorous religious education, and nearly all-consuming ritual practices. Trained to be a Lubavitch emissary, he traveled around the world doing Jewish outreach to help usher in the messianic redemption. However, after exposure to the wider world, he abandoned the faith of his youth.

Brooklyn Odyssey is Newfield’s poignant and hopeful memoir about exiting Orthodoxy. He recounts asserting his individuality and taking the radical step of shaving his beard. Reflective about his upbringing, Newfield is open to and curious about a world beyond Brooklyn while also maintaining his profound bond with his family and Jewish tradition. He writes candidly about his emotional, intellectual, and social experiences in and out of the Lubavitch community.  

From pivotal moments of devastation, including the illness and death of his younger brother and of his revered spiritual leader Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, to moments of joyful resolve, including the decision to pursue a doctorate and marry a non-Orthodox Jew, Newfield takes readers on his moving and impactful journey.

[more]
cover of Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto

Brownsville, Brooklyn

Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto

Wendell E. Pritchett

University of Chicago Press, 2001

From its founding in the late 1800s through the 1950s, Brownsville, a section of eastern Brooklyn, was a white, predominantly Jewish, working-class neighborhood. The famous New York district nurtured the aspirations of thousands of upwardly mobile Americans while the infamous gangsters of Murder, Incorporated controlled its streets. But during the 1960s, Brownsville was stigmatized as a black and Latino ghetto, a neighborhood with one of the city's highest crime rates. Home to the largest concentration of public housing units in the city, Brownsville came to be viewed as emblematic of urban decline. And yet, at the same time, the neighborhood still supported a wide variety of grass-roots movements for social change.

The story of these two different, but in many ways similar, Brownsvilles is compellingly told in this probing new work. Focusing on the interaction of Brownsville residents with New York's political and institutional elites, Wendell Pritchett shows how the profound economic and social changes of post-World War II America affected the area. He covers a number of pivotal episodes in Brownsville's history as well: the rise and fall of interracial organizations, the struggles to deal with deteriorating housing, and the battles over local schools that culminated in the famous 1968 Teachers Strike. Far from just a cautionary tale of failed policies and institutional neglect, the story of Brownsville's transformation, he finds, is one of mutual struggle and frustrated cooperation among whites, blacks, and Latinos.

Ultimately, Brownsville, Brooklyn reminds us how working-class neighborhoods have played, and continue to play, a central role in American history. It is a story that needs to be read by all those concerned with the many challenges facing America's cities today.
[more]
cover of Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870-1930

Budapest and New York

Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870-1930

Thomas Bender

Russell Sage Foundation, 1994

Little over a century ago, New York and Budapest were both flourishing cities engaging in spectacular modernization. By 1930, New York had emerged as an innovating cosmopolitan metropolis, while Budapest languished under the conditions that would foster fascism. Budapest and New York explores the increasingly divergent trajectories of these once-similar cities through the perspectives of both Hungarian and American experts in the fields of political, cultural, social and art history. Their original essays illuminate key aspects of urban life that most reveal the turn-of-the-century evolution of New York and Budapest: democratic participation, use of public space, neighborhood ethnicity, and culture high and low. What comes across most strikingly in these essays is New York's cultivation of social and political pluralism, a trend not found in Budapest. Nationalist ideology exerted tremendous pressure on Budapest's ethnic groups to assimilate to a single Hungarian language and culture. In contrast, New York's ethnic diversity was transmitted through a mass culture that celebrated ethnicity while muting distinct ethnic traditions, making them accessible to a national audience. While Budapest succumbed to the patriotic imperatives of a nation threatened by war, revolution, and fascism, New York, free from such pressures, embraced the variety of its people and transformed its urban ethos into a paradigm for America. Budapest and New York is the lively story of the making of metropolitan culture in Europe and America, and of the influential relationship between city and nation. In unifying essays, the editors observe comparisons not only between the cities, but in the scholarly outlooks and methodologies of Hungarian and American histories. This volume is a unique urban history. Begun under the unfavorable conditions of a divided world, it represents a breakthrough in cross-cultural, transnational, and interdisciplinary historical work.
[more]
cover of Building a Revolutionary State: The Legal Transformation of New York, 1776-1783

Building a Revolutionary State

The Legal Transformation of New York, 1776-1783

Howard Pashman

University of Chicago Press, 2018

How does a popular uprising transform itself from the disorder of revolution into a legal system that carries out the daily administration required to govern? Americans faced this question during the Revolution as colonial legal structures collapsed under the period’s disorder. Yet by the end of the war, Americans managed to rebuild their courts and legislatures, imbuing such institutions with an authority that was widely respected. This remarkable transformation came about in unexpected ways. Howard Pashman here studies the surprising role played by property redistribution—seizing it from Loyalists and transferring it to supporters of independence—in the reconstruction of legal order during the Revolutionary War.

Building a Revolutionary State looks closely at one state, New York, to understand the broader question of how legal structures emerged from an insurgency.  By examining law as New Yorkers experienced it in daily life during the war, Pashman reconstructs a world of revolutionary law that prevailed during America’s transition to independence. In doing so, Pashman explores a central paradox of the revolutionary era:  aggressive enforcement of partisan property rules actually had stabilizing effects that allowed insurgents to build legal institutions that enjoyed popular support.  Tracing the transformation from revolutionary disorder to legal order, Building a New Revolutionary State gives us a radically fresh way to understand the emergence of new states.
[more]
cover of Building the Metropolis: Architecture, Construction, and Labor in New York City, 1880–1935

Building the Metropolis

Architecture, Construction, and Labor in New York City, 1880–1935

Alexander Wood

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A sweeping history of New York that chronicles the construction of one of the world’s great cities.
 
Between the 1880s and the 1930s, New York City experienced explosive growth as nearly a million buildings, dozens of bridges and tunnels, hundreds of miles of subway lines, and thousands of miles of streets were erected to meet the needs of an ever-swelling population. This landscape—jagged with skyscrapers, rattling with the sound of mass transit, alive with people—made the city world-famous.
 
Building the Metropolis offers a revelatory look at this era of urban development by asking, “Who built New York, and how?” Focusing on the work of architects, builders, and construction workers, Alexander Wood chronicles the physical process of the city’s rapid expansion. New York’s towering buildings and busy thoroughfares aren’t just stylish or structural marvels, Wood shows, but the direct result of the many colorful personalities who worked in one of the city’s largest industries. This development boom drew on the resources of the whole community and required money, political will, creative vision, entrepreneurial drive, skilled workmanship, and hard physical labor. Wood shows this to be an even larger story as well. As cities became nodes in a regional, national, and global economy, the business of construction became an important motor of economic, political, and social development. While they held drastically different views on the course of urban growth, machine politicians, reformers, and radicals alike were all committed to city building on an epic scale.
 
Drawing on resources that include city archives and the records of architecture firms, construction companies, and labor unions, Building the Metropolis tells the story of New York in a way that’s epic, lively, and utterly original.
[more]
cover of Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance

Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies

Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance

James F. Wilson

University of Michigan Press, 2011

Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies shines the spotlight on historically neglected plays and performances that challenged early twentieth-century notions of the stratification of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. On Broadway stages, in Harlem nightclubs and dance halls, and within private homes sponsoring rent parties, African American performers of the 1920s and early 1930s teased the limits of white middle-class morality. Blues-singing lesbians, popularly known as "bulldaggers," performed bawdy songs; cross-dressing men vied for the top prizes in lavish drag balls; and black and white women flaunted their sexuality in scandalous melodramas and musical revues. Race leaders, preachers, and theater critics spoke out against these performances that threatened to undermine social and political progress, but to no avail: mainstream audiences could not get enough of the riotous entertainment.James F. Wilson has based his rich cultural history on a wide range of documents from the period, including eyewitness accounts, newspaper reports, songs, and play scripts, combining archival research with an analysis grounded in a cultural studies framework that incorporates both queer theory and critical race theory. Throughout, he argues against the widely held belief that the stereotypical forms of black, lesbian, and gay show business of the 1920s prohibited the emergence of distinctive new voices. Figuring prominently in the book are African American performers including Gladys Bentley, Ethel Waters, and Florence Mills, among others, and prominent writers, artists, and leaders of the era, including Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The study also engages with contemporary literary critics, including Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker. "James F. Wilson uncovers fascinating new material on the Harlem Renaissance, shedding light on the oft-forgotten gay and lesbian contributions to the era's creativity and Civil Rights. Extremely well researched, compellingly written, and highly informative."
—David Krasner, author of A Beautiful Pageant: African American Theatre, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910-1927
[more]
cover of Byline, Richard Wright: Articles from the DAILY WORKER and NEW MASSES

Byline, Richard Wright

Articles from the DAILY WORKER and NEW MASSES

Edited by Earle V. Bryant

University of Missouri Press, 2015

A writer perhaps best known for the revolutionary works Black Boy and Native Son, Richard Wright also worked as a journalist during one of the most explosive periods of the 20th century. From 1937 to 1938, Wright turned out more than two hundred articles for the Daily Worker, the newspaper that served as the voice of the American Communist Party. Byline, Richard Wright assembles more than one hundred of those articles plus two of Wright’s essays from New Masses, revealing to readers the early work of an American icon.

As both reporter and Harlem bureau chief, Wright covered most of the major and minor events, personalities, and issues percolating through the local, national, and global scenes in the late 1930s. Because the Daily Worker wasn’t a mainstream paper, editors gave Wright free rein to cover the stories he wanted, and he tackled issues that no one else covered. Although his peers criticized his journalistic writing, these articles offer revealing portraits of Depression-era America rendered in solid, vivid prose.

Featuring Earle V. Bryant’s informative, detailed introduction and commentary contextualizing the compiled articles, Byline, Richard Wright provides insight into the man before he achieved fame as a novelist, short story writer, and internationally recognized voice of social protest. This collection opens new territory in Wright studies, and fans of Wright’s novels will delight in discovering the lost material of this literary great.

[more]