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In the years between 1880 and 1915, New York City and its environs underwent a tremendous demographic transformation with the arrival of millions of European immigrants, native whites from the rural countryside, and people of African descent from both the American South and the Caribbean. While all groups faced challenges in their adjustment to the city, hardening racial prejudices set the black experience apart from that of other newcomers. Through encounters with each other, blacks and whites, both together and in opposition, forged the contours of race relations that would affect the city for decades to come. Before Harlem reveals how black migrants and immigrants to New York entered a wo...
While elite merchants, financiers, shopkeepers, and customers were the most visible producers, consumers, and distributors of goods and capital in the nineteenth century, they were certainly not alone in shaping the economy. Lurking in the shadows of capitalism's past are those who made markets by navigating a range of new financial instruments, information systems, and modes of transactions: prostitutes, dealers in used goods, mock auctioneers, illegal slavers, traffickers in stolen horses, emigrant runners, pilfering dock workers, and other ordinary people who, through their transactions and lives, helped to make capitalism as much as it made them. Capitalism by Gaslight illuminates Americ...
The complete story of Jewish Harlem and its significance in American Jewish history New York Times columnist David W. Dunlap wrote a decade ago that “on the map of the Jewish Diaspora, Harlem Is Atlantis. . . . A vibrant hub of industry, artistry and wealth is all but forgotten. It is as if Jewish Harlem sank 70 years ago beneath waves of memory beyond recall.” During World War I, Harlem was the home of the second largest Jewish community in America. But in the 1920s Jewish residents began to scatter to other parts of Manhattan, to the outer boroughs, and to other cities. Now nearly a century later, Jews are returning uptown to a gentrified Harlem. The Jews of Harlem follows Jews into, o...
Like so many big cities in the United States, Philadelphia has suffered from a strikingly high murder rate over the past fifty years. Such tragic loss of life, as Eric C. Schneider demonstrates, does not occur randomly throughout the city; rather, murders have been racialized and spatialized, concentrated in the low-income African American populations living within particular neighborhoods. In The Ecology of Homicide, Schneider tracks the history of murder in Philadelphia during a critical period from World War II until the early 1980s, focusing on the years leading up to and immediately following the 1966 Miranda Supreme Court decision and the shift to easier gun access and the resulting sp...
The rise and fall of one of America’s first Black sports celebrities Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in America at the end of the nineteenth century. They were internationally famous, the first African American superstar athletes—and with wins in three Kentucky Derbies and countless other prestigious races, Murphy was the greatest of them all. At the same time, he lived through the seismic events of Emancipation and Reconstruction and formative conflicts over freedom and equality in the United States. And inevitably he was drawn into those conflicts, with devastating consequences. Katherine C. Mooney uncovers the history of Murphy’s troubled life, his death in 1896 at age thirty-five, and his afterlife. In recounting Murphy’s personal story, she also tells two of the great stories of change in nineteenth-century America: the debates over what a multiracial democracy might look like and the battles over who was to hold power in an economy that increasingly resembled the corporate, wealth-polarized world we know today.
A startling examination of the deliberate criminalization of black youths from the 1930s to today A stark disparity exists between black and white youth experiences in the justice system today. Black youths are perceived to be older and less innocent than their white peers. When it comes to incarceration, race trumps class, and even as black youths articulate their own experiences with carceral authorities, many Americans remain surprised by the inequalities they continue to endure. In this revealing book, Carl Suddler brings to light a much longer history of the policies and strategies that tethered the lives of black youths to the justice system indefinitely. The criminalization of black y...
A highly interdisciplinary work, The Black Skyscraper reclaims the influence of race on modern architectural design as well as the less-well-understood effects these designs had on the experience and perception of race.
The untold story of African-born migrants and their vibrant African influence in Harlem. From the 1920s to the early 1960s, Harlem was the intellectual and cultural center of the Black world. The Harlem Renaissance movement brought together Black writers, artists, and musicians from different backgrounds who helped rethink the place of Black people in American society at a time of segregation and lack of recognition of their civil rights. But where is the story of African immigrants in Harlem’s most recent renaissance? Africans in Harlem examines the intellectual, artistic, and creative exchanges between Africa and New York dating back to the 1910s, a story that has not been fully told unt...
Demonstrates how Harlemite's dynamic fight for their rights and neighborhood raised the black community's racial consciousness and established Harlem's legendary political culture. King uncovers early twentieth century Harlem as an intersection between the black intellectuals and artists who created the New Negro Renaissance and the working class who found fought daily to combat institutionalized racism and gender discrimination in both Harlem and across the city. --Adapted from publisher description.
For much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, public officials in cities like New York, Chicago, and Baltimore have criminalized uprisings as portending Black "thugs" throwing rocks at police and plundering private property to undermine complaints of police violence. Liberal mayors like Fiorello H. La Guardia have often been the deftest practitioners of this strategy. As the Depression and wartime conditions spurred youth crime, white New Yorkers' anxieties—about crime, the movement of Black people into white neighborhoods, and headlines featuring Black "hoodlums" emblazoned all over the white media—drove their support for the expansion of police patrols in the city, especially i...