The Graduate School and University Center

City University of New York

Ph D. Program in History

 

History 75800: History of New York City

https://history75800.commons.gc.cuny.edu

 

Professor Thomas Kessner                                                                                    Spring, 2016 – Wednesday, 2-4

212 817-8437; Tkessner@gc.cuny.edu                                                Office hours: Wed: 11-1:30 or by appt.                                            

New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it — once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.

All of everything is concentrated here, population, theater, art, writing, publishing, importing, business, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. It is all of everything. It goes all right. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy.”                                                                                                                                                                                John Steinbeck

Sometimes, from beyond the skyscrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.                                     Albert Camus

In New York the sky is bluer, and the grass is greener, and the girls are prettier, and the steaks are thicker, and the buildings are higher, and the streets are wider, and the air is finer, than the sky, or the grass, or the girls, or the steaks, or the air of any place else in the world.                             Edna Ferber

New York is the only real city-city.                                                                      Truman Capote

 

A hundred times have I thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: It is a beautiful catastrophe.                                                                                                                              Le Corbusier

 

Anytime four New Yorkers get into a cab together without arguing, a bank robbery has just taken place.                                                                                                                           Johnny Carson

 

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.              Simone Beauvoir

 

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there…. Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.                                                                  Ezra Pound

 

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent.                 James Baldwin

 

 

 

For those who would understand the past century of American history, the role of urban society is crucial. The influence of our cities has been considerable, pervasive and shaping. America’s cities exerted broad economic, political and cultural authority, often steering the transforming forces of nineteenth and twentieth century American life. The impact of cities and especially the major metropolises on national life has been extraordinary. While the founding elite of the early republic – Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe – fastened upon the nation the ethos of the plantation and southern life, cities assumed a more important part in setting national priorities following the Civil War.

 

Before long urban life came to define American progress; and driving that narrative was New York City.

Herald of twentieth century modernity, New York  made itself into the center of world capitalism and American culture. The variety of its markets and services afforded it  a reach in space and influence that remains unmatched.  Its  fabled diversity provides a riveting history of relations between groups divided by class, interest, culture, ethnicity, and race.

 

Shown a portrait of her painted by Picasso in his characteristic style, Gertrude Stein gazed at it with some distaste, protesting: “But I don’t look like that”. “Don’t worry,” he replied, “You will, you will.” How often New York has been viewed as unique only to discover that it was merely early. Its history offers a compelling perspective for examining the development of American economic, social, and political life.

 

Over the past decades a generation of freshly conceived city studies have dispelled local history’s lingering fascination with superficial antiquarianism. Urban historians have fashioned a rigorous body of systematic work that is informed by theory and driven by broad questions. Skilled in the tools of social science, and sensitive to calls for inclusion and complexity, city scholars have crafted a textured urban past from the lives of workers, blacks, women, immigrants, and other strands from the common weave.

 

Emphasizing analysis over narrative, applying quantitative techniques to the study of social, economic and demographic patterns, and interested in subjects having to do with the material basis of existence, as well as cultural and political issues, these historians have elaborated a complex process of city history.

While some works fail to pass the test of significance, many of these studies have been provocatively, even dazzlingly conceived. At the same time many of these studies have tended to isolate their subjects from the larger history of the nation or even of American cities in general, creating a field of brilliant fragments. But other studies have taken up the challenge to relate their studies to the larger theme about the textured and varied nature of America’s past.

 

Course Objectives:

1. Provide a survey of the history of one the world’s great urban centers.
2. Offer an understanding of what forces led NYC to develop in the way that it did, and how these larger forces helped frame human decisions and actions.
3. Examine New York’s cultural traditions, its diversity and its economic foundations.
4. Provide an appreciation for the layers of experience that form New York’s historical tradition.

 

Weekly Assignments:

 

*Required;     S Scan available;    E  Electronic version available from Library;  ^Choose one of two 

 

1. “A great natural pier, ready to receive the commerce of the world”

                                                            Mariana van Rensselaer, History of the City of NY in the Seventeenth Century, Shorto, 8                 

*Shorto, Russell. The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America. New York: Doubleday, 2004. pp. 6-66; 265-318. S

*Lepore, Jill. New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.

*Tiedemann, Joseph S. Reluctant Revolutionaries: New York City and the Road to Independence, 1763-1776. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. pp. 221-259. S

^Jaffe, Steven H. New York at War Four Centuries of Combat, Fear, and Intrigue in Gotham. New York: Basic Books, 2012. pp. 51-109. S

^Gilje, Paul A. The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1987. pp. 3-68. S

 

2. The Ditch to Dominance: Merchant City

 

*Albion, Robert Greenhalgh, and Jennie Barnes Pope. The Rise of New York Port [1815-1860]. Boston; New York: Northeastern University Press ; South Street Seaport Museum, 1984. pp. 1-37; 55-75; 95-121; 235-259. S

*Bernstein, Peter L. Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. pp. 89-108; 142-179; 279-292; 308-324; 343-378.

*Stiles, T. J. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. pp. 163-334.

*Blackmar, Elizabeth. Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. pp. 149-182. S

 

3. Ante-bellum New York

 

*Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: Free Press, 2001. pp. 7-303.

*Lobel, Cindy R. Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York, 2014. pp. 1-11; 73-138. S

*Rosenzweig, Roy, and Elizabeth Blackmar. The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. pp. 37-205.

^Gilfoyle, Timothy J. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920. New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 1992. pp. 55-160.

^Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850. London, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. pp. 172-218; 363-390. S

 

4. New York’s Civil War: Prosperity from the Jaws of Tragedy

 

*Bernstein, Iver. The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. pp. 17-192. E

*Kessner, Thomas. Capital City: New York City and the Men behind America’s Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860-1900. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. pp. 1-43.

*Beckert, Sven. The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896. Cambridge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001. pp. 17-171.

^Stiles, T. J. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. pp. 335-364.

^Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: Free Press, 2001. pp. 303-336.

 

5. Transforming the National Economy Through Industry and Finance

Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991. pp. 92-147. S

Kessner, Thomas. Capital City: New York City and the Men behind America’s Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860-1900. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Ch. 3-6.

Beckert, Sven. The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896. Cambridge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001. pp. 172-282.

^Strouse, Jean. Morgan: American Financier. New York: Random House, 1999. pp. 171-187; 222-237; 390-481. S

^Stiles, T. J. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. pp. 365-437

 

6. A Population Ever in Flux: Immigrants, New, Newer and Newest

 

*Howe, Irving, and Kenneth Libo. World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. pp. 5-325.

*Kessner, Thomas. The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880-1915, 1977. 161-177.  S

*Foner, Nancy. One out of Three: Immigrant New York in the Twenty-First Century, 2013. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. 1-89; 267-282. S

^Gabaccia, Donna R. From Sicily to Elizabeth Street Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880-1930. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. pp. 35-116. S

^Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: Free Press, 2001. 362-423.

 

7. Metropolitan Gender

 

*Gilfoyle, Timothy J. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920. New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 1992. pp. 179-316.

*Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. pp. 131-271.

Gilfoyle, Timothy J. A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. 42-91; 127-141; 243-284. S

^Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860. New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1986. pp.105-129; 171-224. S

^Peiss, Kathy Lee. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. pp.11-33; 163-188. S

 

8. The Working City: Labor and Life

 

*Freeman, Joshua B. Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II. New Press,  2001. pp. xii-178.

*Beckert, Sven. The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896. Cambridge, UK; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001. pp. 272-293.

*Orleck, Annelise. Common Sense & a Little Fire Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. pp. 53-120. S

*Guglielmo, Jennifer. Living the Revolution Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. pp. 139-229. E

^Gutman, Herbert G. “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919.” The American Historical Review The American Historical Review 78, no. 3 (1973): 531-588.  E

^Arnesen, Eric. “Up From Exclusion: Black and White Workers, Race, and the State of Labor History.” Reviews in American History 26, no. 1 (1998): 146-174.  E

 

9. African Americans, Race, and the Transforming City

 

*Taylor, Clarence. Civil Rights in New York City from World War II to the Giuliani Era. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. pp. 1-9. S

*Osofsky, Gilbert. Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890-1930. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. pp.1-105. S

*McGruder, Kevin. Race and Real Estate Conflict and Cooperation in Harlem, 1890-1920. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. pp. 34-151. S

*Taylor, Clarence. The Black Churches of Brooklyn. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. pp. 67-136. S

*Biondi, Martha. To Stand and Fight the Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. pp.17-190.

*Greenberg, Cheryl. “The Politics of Disorder.” Journal of Urban History 18, no. 4 (1992): 395–441.  E

*Podair, Jerald E. The Strike That Changed New York Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. 48-182.

^Wilder, Craig Steven. A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. pp. 175-218. S

^Pritchett, Wendell E. Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. pp. 51-174; 221-238. S

 

10. Kinetic New York: Sophisticated, Provincial, Diverse

 

*Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. New York: The Modern Library, 1931. “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” pp. 352-362. S

*Gage, Beverly. The Day Wall Street Exploded a Story of America in Its First Age of Terror. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. pp. 11-124; 309-328.

*Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. pp. 3-94; 126-168; 193-226; 279-320.

*Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995. pp. 3-216.

*Petrus, S and Cohen, Ronald, D. Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. pp. 29-65; 107-145.  S

^Bloom, Alexander. Prodigal Sons the New York Intellectuals & Their World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. pp. 11-157.  E

^Stansell, Christine. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000. pp. 11-119; 147-177; 225-272.

11. The Challenge of Planning: A Future Arranged in the Present

 

*David G McCullough, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. pp. 122-43, 325-416, 505-524.

*Robert A Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Knopf, 1974. Chapters 10, 12, 18, 20, 28, 33, 35, 37-40.

*Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, 1961. pp. 112-317.

*David Ward and Olivier Zunz, The Landscape of Modernity: Essays on New York City, 1900-1940. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992. Chapters 1, 3, 5, 14   S

^Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T Jackson, Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007. pp. 65-71; 86-133.   S

^Anthony Flint, Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City. New York: Random House, 2009. pp. 61-94; 181-195   S

 

12. Building the Modern City

 

*David Ward and Olivier Zunz, The Landscape of Modernity: Essays on New York City, 1900-1940. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1992. Chapters 2, 7, 8.  S

*Keith D Revell, Building Gotham: Civic Culture and Public Policy in New York City, 1898-1938. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. pp. 1-14; 268-280.   S

*Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

*Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. pp. 1-104   S

 

13. “The Second Toughest Job in America:” The Modern Mayoralty

 

*Thomas Kessner, Fiorello H. La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989. pp. 257-539.

*Vincent J Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York. New York: Basic Books, 2001. pp. 75-154; 189-266; 301-352; 389-442; 525-553.

*Jonathan M Soffer, Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. pp. 121-203; 241-255; 317-354; 397-404.

^Chris McNickle, The Power of the Mayor: David Dinkins, 1990-1993. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2013. pp. 191-272; 345-360.    S

^Frederick F Siegel and Harry Siegel, The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life. San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2005. pp. 35-56; 99-128; 141-201; 265-278; 301-08; 323-332.    S

 

 

 

Collateral Assignments:

 

The assignments in this course are designed to help train students and to prepare them for research, writing and teaching. Reading, leading class discussions and participating in them are integral to successfully completing the work for this class. Each session will have a discussion leader who will prepare a short synopsis of the reading to be emailed in advance of class and lead a discussion on the reading.

 

The discussion should focus on major historical issues and pose interpretive/ analytic questions to promote a discussion of the issues. Avoid the presentation of questions that are really another form of lecture. Questions should be direct and open ended and they should be part of a well thought out organized presentation. Asking good questions is critical not only for doing good research but also for running good classes.

 

Each topic will also have an assigned second reader who will offer a critique of the reading based on the review literature and the reader’s own evaluation.

 

There are several additional assignments.

 

Session 3.  Write a 750 word essay on: which of the assigned books that you have read thus far do you find most instructive/useful if you were to teach this as an undergraduate course. Explain why, touching on quality of writing, research, clarity of argument and suitability for undergraduate classes.

 

Session 5. Select a neighborhood or an urban institution (police precinct, library, community district, public school, municipal agency) and prepare a history based on research (can include documents, newspapers, interviews, memoir and diary literature, but not secondary sources). In your profile discuss the historic mission and your assessment of the way that it has met the needs it was designed to address. If you choose a community profile for, example, the paper should offer a brief history of the area (use books, magazines, and newspaper articles as well as interviews with residents, local workers, businessmen, political figures) its physical layout, local landmarks, the people and something of the tone and texture of the community. 3,000 words.

 

Session 7.  1. Go back fifty years from your birthday and look up the NY Times for that day. Read it in its entirety, including reviews and ads. Write a two page description of the day and what you find historically noteworthy. 2. Find the paper for 25 years later and then a third newspaper for the day of your birth. Select a single theme that you trace through all three issues write a four page paper on its development over the half century. You  may look at changes in the physical city, in ethnic or race relations, in the kinds of crime that are reported, in municipal politics or entertainment, or even at the changes in advertising strategy and format. Do not use any sources beyond the paper.

 

Session 9. Write a 750 word review of a book relevant to your research topic. The review should summarize the book, as you understand it. Discuss the highlights and the major points as they relate to the city and its history. Do not select a novel or a text as this will be too complicated for you to review. Once you have summarized the book (2-3 pages) discuss the author’s method of making his/her argument and any other thoughts you have on the quality of the narrative, the clarity of the argument, the use of sources, how the book has changed your understanding of the city, etc. Use examples from the text to back up your points.

The Paper. Either a historiography paper on an approved topic, 12-15 pages; or:  choose a topic in Urban history between 1860 and 1960 and based upon  research in newspapers and magazines write a documented, analytic essay approximately 15 pages in length. The objective of the essay is to identify, categorize and analyze your topic’s relationship to the larger urban narrative, metropolitan, regional or national.

 

You may select a topic like the Brooklyn Bridge, the development of a community, the urban political process, a prominent figure, a social movement, an institution, a business, a cultural mode, etc.

The paper will obviously be limited in scope. But you can look at an issue as it was reported (recognizing that errors often do creep into reports when an observer writes against a deadline, is forced to depend upon random testimony and often lacks context). Do not settle upon a single circumstance or event; build a base of information that can be related thematically to your topic.

 

Your paper should be based exclusively on what can be learned from the primary research. You may use one secondary source to provide the context, but not for information. Footnote your material with brief citations.

 

Start early. Reserve a good bit of time to organize and write the paper.

 

By the fifth session you will need to hand in a brief outline of your subject and your secondary source. The paper will be due the first week in May. There is a one week grace period. If you submit your paper late your grade will reflect the tardiness.

 

Feel free to consult me with any problems or questions.  If you want a copy back submit two copies of your paper.

 

N.B.: Keep copies of everything you submit. Your papers should be your own work and reflect your own research. Where you have relied on outside sources for material make sure that this is noted. Quotes should be marked off to indicate they are not your words and they should be footnoted. Do not use previously submitted papers, purchased material or any other form of work that is not your own. The consequences of plagiarism can be serious. Enough said.