Results by title
479 books match the query 'New York (State)' and 9 start with o
Of Cabbages and Kings County
Agriculture and the Formation of Modern BrooklynMarc Linder
University of Iowa Press, 1999
No one today thinks of Brooklyn, New York, as an agricultural center. Yet Kings County enjoyed over two centuries of farming prosperity. Even as late as 1880 it was one of the nation's leading vegetable producers, second only to neighboring Queens County.
In Of Cabbages and Kings County, Marc Linder and Lawrence Zacharias reconstruct the history of a lost agricultural community. Their study focuses on rural Kings County, the site of Brooklyn's tremendous expansion during the latter part of the nineteenth century. In particular, they question whether sprawl was a necessary condition of American industrialization: could the agricultural base that preceded and surrounded the city have survived the onrush of residential real estate speculation with a bit of foresight and public policies that the politically outnumbered farmers could not have secured on their own?
The first part of the book reviews the county's Dutch American agricultural tradition, in particular its conversion after 1850 from extensive farming (e.g., wheat, corn) to intensive farming of market garden crops. The authors examine the growing competition between local farmers and their southern counterparts for a share of the huge New York City market, comparing farming conditions and factors such as labor and transportation.
In the second part of the book, the authors turn their attention to the forces that eventually destroyed Kings County's farming—ranging from the political and ideological pressures to modernize the city's rural surroundings to unplanned, market-driven attempts to facilitate transportation for more affluent city dwellers to recreational outlets on Coney Island and, once transportation was at hand, to replace farms with residential housing for the city's congested population.
Drawing on a vast range of archival sources, the authors refocus the history of Brooklyn to uncover what was lost with the expansion of the city. For today, as urban planners, ecologists, and agricultural developers reevaluate urban sprawl and the need for greenbelts or agricultural-urban balance, the lost opportunities of the past loom larger.
Of G-Men and Eggheads
The FBI and the New York IntellectualsJohn Rodden
University of Illinois Press, 2017
John Rodden cuts this tall tale down to its authentic pint size, refusing to indulge the public relations myth promoted by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. In Of G-Men and Eggheads, Rodden portrays federal agents’ hilarious obsession with monitoring that ever-present threat to national security, the American literary intellectual. Drawing on government dossiers and archives, Rodden focuses on the onetime members of a radical political sect of ex-Trotskyists (barely numbering a thousand at its height), the so-called New York intellectuals. He describes the nonsensical decades-long pursuit of this group of intellectuals, especially Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, and Irving Howe. The Keystone Cops style of numerous FBI agents is documented carefully in Rodden's meticulous case studies of how Hoover's men recruited informants to snoop on the "Commies," opened their personal mail, tracked their movements, and reported on their wives and friends.
On Broadway
Art and Commerce on the Great White WaySteven Adler
Southern Illinois University Press, 2004
At a critical, transitional moment in the history of Broadway—and, by extension, of American theatre itself—former Broadway stage manager Steven Adlerenlists insider perspectives from sixty-six practitioners and artists to chronicle the recent past and glimpse the near future of the Great White Way. From marquee names to behind-the-scenes power brokers, Adler has assembled a distinctly knowledgeable cast of theatre’s elite, including Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Des McAnuff, Frank Rich, Robin Wagner, Rocco Landesman, Robert Longbottom, Todd Haimes, Bernard Gersten, and Alan Eisenberg.
On Broadway: Art and Commerce on the Great White Way spotlights the differing vantage points of performers, artists, writers, managers, producers, critics, lawyers, theatre owners, union leaders, city planners, and other influential players. Each details his or her firsthand account of the creative and economic forces that have wrought extraordinary changes in the way Broadway theatre is conceived, produced, marketed, and executed. Once the paramount site of American theatre, Broadway today is becoming a tourist-driven, family-friendly, middle-class entertainment oasis in Midtown, an enterprise inextricably bound to the larger mosaic of national and international professional theatre.
Accounting for this transformation and presaging Broadway’s identity for the twenty-first century, Adler and his interviewees assess the impact of the advent of corporate producers, the ascendance of not-for-profit theatres on Broadway, and the growing interdependence between regional and Broadway productions. Also critiqued are the important roles of the radical urban redevelopment staged in Times Square and the changing demographics and appetites of contemporary theatre audiences in New York and around the globe.
Actors and administrators, performers and producers, theatre students and theatregoers will all benefit from the perceptive insights in this authoritative account of theatre making for the new millennium.
One Shaker Life
Isaac Newton Youngs, 1793-1865Glendyne R. Wergland
University of Massachusetts Press, 2006
A member of the United Society of Believers, better known as the Shakers, Isaac Newton Youngs spent most of his life in New Lebanon, New York, home of the society's central Ministry. As both a private diarist and the official village scribe, he kept meticulous records throughout those years of both his own experience and that of the community. All told, more than four thousand pages of Brother Isaac's journals have survived, documenting the history of the Shakers during the period of their greatest success and providing a revealing view of the daily life of a rank-and-file Believer.
In this deeply researched biography, Glendyne R. Wergland draws on Youngs's writings to tell his story and to explore “the tension between desire and discipline” at the center of his life. She follows Youngs from childhood and adolescence to maturity, through years of demanding responsibility into his fatal decline. In each of these stages, he remained a talented and committed yet independent Shaker, one who chose to stay with the community but often struggled to abide by its stringent rules, including the vow of celibacy. Perhaps above all, he was a man who spent most of his waking hours working diligently at a succession of tasks, making clocks, sewing clothes, fixing roofs, writing poetry, chronicling his daily acts and thoughts.
In his journals, Brother Isaac writes at length of his efforts to control his lust as a young man, and he complains repeatedly about overwork as he grows older. He defines the rules of his community and identifies transgressors, while enciphering his critical entries (and those chronicling his own sexual desires) to avoid detection and uphold the demand for conformity. At times he admits doubt, but without ever relinquishing the belief that he is on the straight and narrow path to salvation. What emerges in the end is the complex portrait of an ordinary man striving to live up to the imperatives of his faith.
Open Admissions
The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free CollegeDanica Savonick
Duke University Press, 2024
Operatic Infrastructures
Materiality and Meaning in 1890s London, Paris, and New YorkFlora Willson
University of Chicago Press, 2026
An exploration of the fundamental relationship between opera and urban modernity in three iconic cities: London, Paris, and New York.
At the end of the nineteenth century, London, Paris, and New York were quintessential modern metropolises and vital centers for opera. In Operatic Infrastructures, Flora Willson examines opera’s roots in the material worlds of these cities. Reaching beyond histories of opera as spectacle, she investigates the physical underpinnings of opera at the century’s end as an inter-urban, multimedia network.
Operatic Infrastructures considers emergent technologies such as the telephone and the subway, but it also retrieves the hidden, forgotten, and otherwise effaced traces of systems such as storage facilities and colonial trade routes. It takes seriously the mundane aspects of materiality, from the blandest clichés of newspaper columns to the fine print of insurance certificates. In doing so, the book reveals just how far these interfaces with modern urban life reached into opera’s own systems of meaning-making and performance in the 1890s—making it impossible to demarcate neatly between “opera” and its “context.” Without such operatic infrastructures, Willson shows, there would be no opera at all.
Organizing for Educational Justice
The Campaign for Public School Reform in the South BronxMichael B. Fabricant
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Orphan Trains to Missouri
Michael D. Patrick & Evelyn Goodrich Trickel
University of Missouri Press, 1997
As an "orphan train" crossed the country, it left part of its cargo at each stop, a few children in one small town and a few in another. Even though farmers needed many hands for labor, most of the small farm communities could not or would not take all of the children on the train. As the train moved to its next stop, those children not taken feared no one would ever want them.
Early immigration laws encouraged the poor of Europe to find new hope with new lives in the United States. But sometimes the immigrants exchanged a bad situation in their native country for an even worse one on the streets of New York and other industrial cities. As a result, the streets were filled with crowds of abandoned children that the police called "street arabs." Many New York citizens blamed the street arabs for crime and violence in the city and wanted them placed in orphan homes or prisons.
In 1853 a man by the name of Charles Loring Brace, along with other well-to-do men in New York City, founded the Children's Aid Society. The society planned to give food, lodging, and clothing to homeless children and provide educational and trade opportunities for them. But the number of children needing help was so large that the Children's Aid Society was unable to care for them, and Brace developed a plan to send many of the children to the rural Midwest by train. He was convinced that the children of the streets would find many benefits in rural America. In 1854 he persuaded the board of the society to send the first trainload of orphans west. With this, the orphan trains were born.
Cheap fares, the central location of the state, and numerous small farming towns along the railroad tracks made Missouri the perfect hub for the orphan trains, even though many areas of the state were still largely unsettled. Researchers have estimated that from 150,000 to 400,000 children were sent out on orphan trains, with perhaps as many as 100,000 being placed in Missouri.
Orphan Trains to Missouri documents the history of the children on those Orphan Trains--their struggles, their successes, and their failures. Touching stories of volunteers who oversaw the placement of the orphans as well as stories of the orphans themselves make this a rich record of American and midwestern history.
Ours to Lose
When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York CityAmy Starecheski
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting in a way never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the oral history of that movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. Amy Starecheski here not only tells a little-known New York story, she also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America.