Michael J. Douma is Associate Professor in the McDonough School of Business and Director of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics at Georgetown University. This interview is based on his new book, The Slow Death of […]
New York History
Air check of the day
Some context. Another part of my childhood is gone. No change for Mets radio. Here is Mets radio legend Howie Rose:
Mike Barnicle, Dan Barry, and Mike Lupica remember Jimmy Breslin
Library of America just sent me a copy of Dan Barry’s edited collection Jimmy Breslin: Essential Writings. I grew-up reading Breslin, the quintessential New York journalist/columnist who used his succinct prose to tell stories of people living on the periphery […]
The Author’s Corner with Emily Brooks
Emily Brooks is a Historian and Curriculum Writer at the New York Public Library’s Center for Educators and Schools. This interview is based on her new book, Gotham’s War within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World […]
Martin Scorsese’s “Italianamerican”
In 1974, the famed filmmaker interviewed his parents and turned it into a documentary film. I thought I was sitting in the room with my own Italian grandparents. Oh the stories! I could listen to Catherine Scorsese talk all day. […]
What should we make of Staten Island?
For one year in graduate school (1998-1999) I made a weekly commute between Stony Brook, Long Island and Philadelphia. During that year I often drove through Staten Island. My trip along Interstate 278 took me past the Fresh Kills Landfill. […]
In early republican New York, food was a “public good”
Over at JSTOR Daily, Matthew Wills introduces us to the work of historian Gergerly Baics. In a 2016 piece in Urban History he argued that early republican New York was “characterized by centralized, municipal food provisioning.” Baics developed these thoughts […]
Ed Ayers in the “burned-over district”
The historian and his wife Abby recently toured “the quiet farmlands and serene towns along the Erie Canal” once known as the “burned-over district.” As Ayers writes in this piece at Bunk: “Religious revivals, reform movements, and political conflict had […]
The Buffalo shooting in historical context
Historian Chad Williams places the shooting in the larger context of Buffalo history. Here is a taste of his piece at The Washington Post: Historical context is necessary to fully grasp the significance of the Buffalo shooting. White-supremacist terrorism targeting […]
Kenneth Jackson reviews Jon Butler’s God in Gotham
One of the late 20th-century’s foremost historians of New York City reviews one of the late 20th-century’s foremost religious historians. Here is a taste of Jackson’s review of Butler‘s God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan: When […]
The radical tradition in early national New York
Historian Sean Griffin explores the legacy of Thomas Paine in early 19th-century New York. Here is a taste of his piece at the blog Gotham: New York City has long been considered a hotbed of radical political ideas, as well […]
How Americans have remembered the July 1776 toppling of the George III statue in Bowling Green (Manhattan)
Wendy Bellion, an art historian at the University of Delaware, has an interesting piece at Smithsonian Magazine on the patriots’ toppling of this statue and a New York Historical Society exhibit on monuments. Here is a taste: A monument to […]