Unearthing Gotham

Unearthing Gotham PDF Author: Anne-Marie E. Cantwell
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300097993
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Under the teeming metropolis that is present-day New York City lie the buried remains of long-lost worlds. The remnants of nineteenth-century New York reveal much about its inhabitants and neighborhoods, from fashionable Washington Square to the notorious Five Points. Underneath there are traces of the Dutch and English colonists who arrived in the area in the seventeenth century, as well as of the Africans they enslaved. And beneath all these layers is the land that Native Americans occupied for hundreds of generations from their first arrival eleven thousand years ago. Now two distinguished archaeologists draw on the results of more than a century of excavations to relate the interconnected stories of these different peoples who shared and shaped the land that makes up the modern city. In treating New York's five boroughs as one enormous archaeological site, Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall weave Native American, colonial, and post-colonial history into an absorbing, panoramic narrative. They also describe the work of the archaeologists who uncovered this evidence--nineteenth-century pioneers, concerned citizens, and today's professionals. In the process, Cantwell and Wall raise provocative questions about the nature of cities, urbanization, the colonial experience, Indian life, the family, and the use of space. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, Unearthing Gotham offers a fresh perspective on the richness of the American legacy.

Unearthing Gotham

Unearthing Gotham PDF Author: Anne-Marie E. Cantwell
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300097993
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Get Book Here

Book Description
Under the teeming metropolis that is present-day New York City lie the buried remains of long-lost worlds. The remnants of nineteenth-century New York reveal much about its inhabitants and neighborhoods, from fashionable Washington Square to the notorious Five Points. Underneath there are traces of the Dutch and English colonists who arrived in the area in the seventeenth century, as well as of the Africans they enslaved. And beneath all these layers is the land that Native Americans occupied for hundreds of generations from their first arrival eleven thousand years ago. Now two distinguished archaeologists draw on the results of more than a century of excavations to relate the interconnected stories of these different peoples who shared and shaped the land that makes up the modern city. In treating New York's five boroughs as one enormous archaeological site, Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall weave Native American, colonial, and post-colonial history into an absorbing, panoramic narrative. They also describe the work of the archaeologists who uncovered this evidence--nineteenth-century pioneers, concerned citizens, and today's professionals. In the process, Cantwell and Wall raise provocative questions about the nature of cities, urbanization, the colonial experience, Indian life, the family, and the use of space. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, Unearthing Gotham offers a fresh perspective on the richness of the American legacy.

Gastropolis

Gastropolis PDF Author: Annie Hauck-Lawson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231136528
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
An irresistible sampling of the city's rich food heritage, Gastropolis explores the personal and historical relationship between New Yorkers and food. Beginning with the origins of New York's fusion cuisine, such as Mt. Olympus bagels and Puerto Rican lasagna, the book describes the nature of food and drink before the arrival of Europeans in 1624 and offers a history of early farming practices. Specially written essays trace the function of place and memory in Asian cuisine, the rise of Jewish food icons, the evolution of food enterprises in Harlem, the relationship between restaurant dining and identity, and the role of peddlers and markets in guiding the ingredients of our meals. They share spice-scented recollections of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, and colorful vignettes of the avant-garde chefs, entrepreneurs, and patrons who continue to influence the way New Yorkers eat.

The Aesthetics of Necropolitics

The Aesthetics of Necropolitics PDF Author: Natasha Lushetich
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786606860
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Every politics is an aesthetic. If necropolitics is the (accelerated) politics of what is usually referred to as the ‘apolitical age’, what are its manoeuvres, temporalities, intensities, textures, and tipping points? Bypassing revelatory and reconstructionist approaches – the tendency of which is to show that a particular site or practice is necropolitical by bringing its genealogy into evidence – this collection of essays by artist-philosophers and theorist curators articulates the pre-perceptual working of necropolitics through a focus on the senses, assignments of energy, attitudes, cognitive processes, and discursive frameworks. Drawing on different yet complementary methodologies (visual, performance, affect, and network analysis; historiography and ethnography), the contributors analyse cultural fetishes, taboos, sensorial and relational processes anchored in everyday practices, or cued by specific artworks. By mapping the necropolitics’ affective cartography, they expand the concept beyond its teleological, anthropocentric, and reductive horizon of ‘making and letting die’ to include posthuman and posthumous actants, effectively arguing for the necropolitics’ transformatory, political potential.

City at the Water's Edge

City at the Water's Edge PDF Author: Betsy McCully
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813539153
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Concrete floors and concrete walls, buildings that pierce the sky, taxicabs and subway corridors, a steady din of noise. These things, along with a virtually unrivaled collection of museums, galleries, performance venues, media outlets, international corporations, and stock exchanges make New York City not only the cultural and financial capital of the United States, but one of the largest and most impressive urban conglomerations in the world. With distinctions like these, is it possible to imagine the city as any more than this? City at the Water's Edge invites readers to do just that. Betsy McCully, a long-time urban dweller, argues that this city of lights is much more than a human-made metropolis. It has a rich natural history that is every bit as fascinating as the glitzy veneer that has been built atop it. Through twenty years of nature exploration, McCully has come to know New York as part of the Lower Hudson Bioregion-a place of salt marshes and estuaries, sand dunes and barrier islands, glacially sculpted ridges and kettle holes, rivers and streams, woodlands and outwash plains. Here she tells the story of New York that began before the first humans settled in the region twelve thousand years ago, and long before immigrants ever arrived at Ellis Island. The timeline that she recounts is one that extends backward half a billion years; it plumbs the depths of Manhattan's geological history and forecasts a possible future of global warming, with rising seas lapping at the base of the Empire State Building. Counter to popular views that see the city as a marvel of human ingenuity diametrically opposed to nature, this unique account shows how the region has served as an evolving habitat for a diversity of species, including our own. The author chronicles the growth of the city at the expense of the environment, but leaves the reader with a vision of a future city as a human habitat that is brought into balance with nature.

New York Recentered

New York Recentered PDF Author: Kara Murphy Schlichting
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022661302X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
The history of New York City’s urban development often centers on titanic municipal figures like Robert Moses and on prominent inner Manhattan sites like Central Park. New York Recentered boldly shifts the focus to the city’s geographic edges—the coastlines and waterways—and to the small-time unelected locals who quietly shaped the modern city. Kara Murphy Schlichting details how the vernacular planning done by small businessmen and real estate operators, performed independently of large scale governmental efforts, refigured marginal locales like Flushing Meadows and the shores of Long Island Sound and the East River in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The result is a synthesis of planning history, environmental history, and urban history that recasts the story of New York as we know it.

Building the Skyline

Building the Skyline PDF Author: Jason M. Barr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199344388
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
The Manhattan skyline is one of the great wonders of the modern world. But how and why did it form? Much has been written about the city's architecture and its general history, but little work has explored the economic forces that created the skyline. In Building the Skyline, Jason Barr chronicles the economic history of the Manhattan skyline. In the process, he debunks some widely held misconceptions about the city's history. Starting with Manhattan's natural and geological history, Barr moves on to how these formations influenced early land use and the development of neighborhoods, including the dense tenement neighborhoods of Five Points and the Lower East Side, and how these early decisions eventually impacted the location of skyscrapers built during the Skyscraper Revolution at the end of the 19th century. Barr then explores the economic history of skyscrapers and the skyline, investigating the reasons for their heights, frequencies, locations, and shapes. He discusses why skyscrapers emerged downtown and why they appeared three miles to the north in midtown-but not in between the two areas. Contrary to popular belief, this was not due to the depths of Manhattan's bedrock, nor the presence of Grand Central Station. Rather, midtown's emergence was a response to the economic and demographic forces that were taking place north of 14th Street after the Civil War. Building the Skyline also presents the first rigorous investigation of the causes of the building boom during the Roaring Twenties. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the boom was largely a rational response to the economic growth of the nation and city. The last chapter investigates the value of Manhattan Island and the relationship between skyscrapers and land prices. Finally, an Epilogue offers policy recommendations for a resilient and robust future skyline.

Complicity

Complicity PDF Author: Anne Farrow
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307414795
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A startling and superbly researched book demythologizing the North’s role in American slavery “The hardest question is what to do when human rights give way to profits. . . . Complicity is a story of the skeletons that remain in this nation’s closet.”—San Francisco Chronicle The North’s profit from—indeed, dependence on—slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. Complicity reveals the cruel truth about the lucrative Triangle Trade of molasses, rum, and slaves that linked the North to the West Indies and Africa. It also discloses the reality of Northern empires built on tainted profits—run, in some cases, by abolitionists—and exposes the thousand-acre plantations that existed in towns such as Salem, Connecticut. Here, too, are eye-opening accounts of the individuals who profited directly from slavery far from the Mason-Dixon line. Culled from long-ignored documents and reports—and bolstered by rarely seen photos, publications, maps, and period drawings—Complicity is a fascinating and sobering work that actually does what so many books pretend to do: shed light on America’s past.

New York Underground

New York Underground PDF Author: Julia Solis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000143619
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Did alligators ever really live in New York's sewers? What's it like to explore the old aqueducts beneath the city? How many levels are beneath Grand Central Station? And how exactly did the pneumatic tube system that New York's post offices used to employ work? In this richly illustrated historical tour of New York's vast underground systems, Julia Solis answers all these questions and much, much more. New York Underground takes readers through ingenious criminal escape routes, abandoned subway stations, and dark crypts beneath lower Manhattan to expose the city's basic anatomy. While the city is justly famous for what lies above ground, its underground passages are equally legendary and tell us just as much about how the city works.

New York State: Peoples, Places, and Priorities

New York State: Peoples, Places, and Priorities PDF Author: Joanne Reitano
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113669997X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
The state of New York is virtually a nation unto itself. Long one of the most populous states and home of the country’s most dynamic city, New York is geographically strategic, economically prominent, socially diverse, culturally innovative, and politically influential. These characteristics have made New York distinctive in our nation’s history. In New York State: Peoples, Places, and Priorities, Joanne Reitano brings the history of this great state alive for readers. Clear and accessible, the book features: Primary documents and illustrations in each chapter, encouraging engagement with historical sources and issues Timelines for every chapter, along with lists of recommended reading and websites Themes of labor, liberty, lifestyles, land, and leadership running throughout the text Coverage from the colonial period up through the present day, including the Great Recession and Andrew Cuomo’s governorship Highly readable and up-to-date, New York State: Peoples, Places, and Priorities is a vital resource for anyone studying, teaching, or just interested in the history of the Empire State.

The Bronx River: An Environmental & Social History

The Bronx River: An Environmental & Social History PDF Author: Maarten de Kadt
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1614233861
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
The Bronx River flows twenty-three miles from its source in Valhalla to its mouth, the East River in the Bronx. This waterway was used for centuries by Native American tribes for drinking, food and transportation, and they called it "Aquehung" a fast stream flowing along a high bluff. After the arrival of Europeans, though, the Bronx River suffered as industry prospered; it powered mills and, unfortunately, became a dumping ground for all kinds of waste. Its appearance and ecosystem were forever changed. Today, community members are again attempting to alter the river, but this time for the better, by helping it recover. Discover the fascinating history of this small waterway and the ways it influenced and was affected by the people around it.