New York history

"Community-based? Asian American Students, Parents, and Teachers in the Shifting Chinatowns of New York and Los Angeles"

by Benji Chang

Chang, B., & Lee, J. H. (2012). “Community-Based?” Asian American Youth, Parents and Community in the Shifting Chinatowns of New York and Los Angeles. Asian American Pacific Islander Nexus Journal, 10(2) 99-117.

This article examines the experiences of children, parents, and teachers in the New York and Los Angeles Chinatown... more This article examines the experiences of children, parents, and teachers in the New York and Los Angeles Chinatown public
schools, as observed by two classroom educators, one based in
each city.

The authors document trends among the transnational East and Southeast Asian families that comprise the majority in the local Chinatown schools and discuss some of the key intersections of communities and identities within those schools, as well as the pedagogies that try to build upon these intersections in the name of student empowerment and a more holistic vision of student achievement.

Ultimately, this article seeks to bring forth the unique perspectives of Chinatown community members and explore how
students, families, teachers, school staff and administrators, and
community organizers can collaborate to actualize a more transformative public education experience.

Parameters of the Fur Trade in New Netherland: Eighteenth-Century Evidence? (2006)

by Kees-Jan Waterman

Paper delivered at first joint conference of the American Association for Netherlandic Studies (AANS) and the New Netherland Institute (NNI), Albany, N.Y., USA, June 2006.
Published in Margriet Bruijn Lacy, Charles Gehring, Jenneke Oosterhoff (eds.), From De Halve Maen to KLM: 400 Years of Dutch-American Exchange [Studies in Dutch Language and Culture, vol. 2, Margriet Bruijn Lacy,
(ed.)], pp. 135-148. Münster: Nodus Publikationen, 2008.

The objective of this article is to establish whether close examination of a Dutch account book for the fur trade with... more The objective of this article is to establish whether close examination of a Dutch account book for the fur trade with Indians in colonial Albany, 1695-1726, yields useful data to assist us in reconstructing some parameters of the fur trade in New Netherland. From the account book a number of broad characteristics can be distilled that characterize the trade between Indians and two members of a family with strong New Netherland ancestry. The approach of this article is inspired by ethnohistorical studies that deploy a technique called "upstreaming": the researcher identifies a given set of circumstances and consults sources from progressively earlier times (goes "upstream") to examine if and to what degree such circumstances were recognizable in previous periods. In doing so, one may gain insights into the persistence or adaptations of the practices developed and deployed in the intercultural trade between colonists and Indians in New Netherland.

Not Confined to the Village Clearings: Indian Women in the Fur Trade in Colonial New York, 1695-1732 (2008)

by Kees-Jan Waterman

Motivations and Practicalities in the New York Fur Trade, 1695-1732 (2011)

by Kees-Jan Waterman

As For Chelsea, Goodbye to All That

by Michael Carosone

Co-authored with Joseph LoGiudice.  Originally published in The Huffington Post. 

Finding the parents of John Moore of Orange County

by Bart Kowallis

Kowallis, B.J., 2007, Finding the parents of John Moore of Orange County: New York Genealogical & Biographical Record, v. 138, p. 273-283.

The Duers/Dewers Family of Washington County

by Bart Kowallis

Kowallis, B.J., 2006, The Duers/Dewers Family of Washington County: The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record: v. 137, p. 93-102 and 201-210.

Patriotism and Protest: Union Square as Public Space 1832-1932

by Joanna Merwood-Salisbury

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (December 2009)

Designated a National Historic Landmark and linked to the greatest nineteenth-century American landscape designer,... more Designated a National Historic Landmark and linked to the greatest nineteenth-century American landscape designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, Union Square in New York City offers a counter-example to Central Park of a public space symbolic of the political ideal of democracy. Its early-nineteenth century designers did not intend this symbolism, modeling it after the secluded English residential square. However, following large gatherings in support of the Union during the Civil War, it acquired civic and national prominence as the site of mass political rallies, including the first Labor Day parade in 1882, and anarchist, socialist and communist demonstrations in the early twentieth-century. This essay cites contemporary sources including newspapers, city records, and reports of public meetings to illustrate the ways in which the design, use and regulation of Union Square tested the physical and political definitions of public space in the United States.

Remembering and forgetting the Great War in New York City

by Ross Wilson

First World War Studies Volume 3, Issue 1, 2012, p.87-106

This article examines the history of the Great War in New York City and the means by which it has been remembered and... more This article examines the history of the Great War in New York City and the means by which it has been remembered and forgotten through the presence and absence of war memorials. New York City played a unique role in the history of the Great War, contributing to the war effort even before the declaration of war by the United States in 1917. The wartime experiences in the city were accompanied by political and racial tensions as fears of foreign influences undermining the city and the wider nation were ever-present. In a city which had witnessed large-scale immigration over the preceding century, fears of unrest or unpatriotic and un-American behaviour preoccupied both the city and the federal government. Nevertheless, the wartime contribution of the city's foreign-born residents was substantial as large numbers registered for military service. As a means of reaffirming the principles of patriotism and an ‘American’ identity for the city, after the Armistice the official bodies and veterans groups worked to develop a singular expression or ‘spirit’ for the local war memorials. As the schemes for a central war memorial for the city floundered, the local memorials served as a means for residents to adopt and adapt this hegemonic expression of ‘American’ identity and form specific memories of the war for each community.

Struggling for Freedom: Arthur Miller, The

by Nathan Abrams

Multivocality and Vernacular Architecture: The Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto in Rosebank, Staten Island

by Joseph Sciorra

Luisa Del Giudice, ed. Studies in Italian American Folklore (Utah State University Press, 1993).

In October of 1937, a group of Italian immigrant men began constructing a grotto in the Rosebank section of Staten... more In October of 1937, a group of Italian immigrant men began constructing a grotto in the Rosebank section of Staten Island, New York. As members of the Society of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, they built the structure on property owned by the voluntary association. Today, the lay organization maintains the upkeep of the elaborate shrine and celebrates the Madonna’s July 16th feast with an annual procession through neighborhood streets and festa activities staged on society grounds. Devotees visit the shrine daily and during the two weekend long festivities to pray before the statues of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the Roman Catholic saints housed at the grotto.
[. . .]
This essay attempts to address the multivocality of the Rosebank grotto by focusing on the ways people invest the site with meaning through expressive behavior, the spoken word, and the written text. Those who created, maintain, and interact with this built environment engender the site’s social meanings through a host of individual voices that complement, contradict, and, sometimes, contest one another. There is no single person or community of people that speaks authoritatively for the site but a polyphony of overlapping voices that contribute to the shrine’s symbolic meaning(s). This polyvalence links the lives of builders, association members, pilgrims, clergy, journalists, and the ethnographer in an intertwined dialogue in search of signification. A narrative-centered approach to vernacular architecture studies is intended to explore the ways individuals, identities, and ideologies converge and conflict in dynamic relationship to the built environment.

Heaven Touches Brooklyn in July (review)

by Joseph Sciorra

Italian Americans have developed a mythic narrative that chronicles their triumph over harrowing deprivation, economic... more Italian Americans have developed a mythic narrative that chronicles their triumph over harrowing deprivation, economic exploitation, and ethnic discrimination, as well as their ascent
into middle- and upper-middle-class success, troubled only by continued depictions of the mafia in cinema and television. This uncritical and linear account of self-resolve, family cohesion, and religious conviction ending in the boardrooms and suburbia of white America involves a significant amount of memory loss and obfuscation of the historical record. During the past twenty-five years, scholars and artists have begun to critique and dismantle “common-sense” histories and assumptions by exploring topics such as the larger global Italian diasporic experience, Italian American involvement in labor struggles and radical left politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their support of fascism during the 1920s and1930s, especially among ethnic elites, patriarchal violence and intergenerational conflict, and the privileges of whiteness in a racist society.

Musical of the Month: 'Shuffle Along'

by Brian Valencia

Guest Blog for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (Doug Reside, Digital Curator)

SASA

by Christopher F. Minty

Faction in New Netherland

by Pirmin Olde Weghuis

An essay written for the Failed Colonies course at the University of Groningen.

In the seventeenth century the people of the most densely populated area in Europe would become the leading nation in... more In the seventeenth century the people of the most densely populated area in Europe would become the leading nation in the world.  The Dutch Golden Age brought Flemings, Walloons and immigrants in the Dutch Republic enormous wealth and prosperity. At first the East India Company brought the Dutch the valuable commodities from the Eastern hemisphere. To expand this success the West India Company was founded and chartered by the States General to make a claim in the Americas and regulate slave trade in Africa. The Dutch colonies at the Delaware, Connecticut and Hudson rivers were quite prosperous and flourished under free trade. This essay will focus on the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam which is now widely known as New York City. When between 1624 and 1626 the Hudson River valley was taken by the Dutch, Deacon Pierre Minuit founded New Amsterdam at the estuary of the Hudson at Manhattan. New Amsterdam was intended to become, as a part of New Netherland, a mere reflection of the mother country in terms of trade, religion and the state.  This essay will go into the structures of which the Dutch Republic’s colony consisted and will then examine the conflict between the magistrates, the clergy and the settlers in New Amsterdam.

 Emancipation Landscapes: Archaeologies of Racial Modernity and the Public Sphere in Early New York. In The Importance of Material Things, Vol. II, J. Shablitsky and M. Leone, eds., Society for Historical Archaeology, 2011.

by Christopher Matthews

 Emancipation Landscapes: Archaeologies of Racial Modernity and the Public Sphere in Early New York. In The Importance of Material Things, Vol. II, J. Shablitsky and M. Leone, eds., Society for Historical Archaeology, 2011.

by Christopher Matthews

 Lonely Islands: Culture and Poverty in Archaeological Perspective. Historical Archaeology 45(3):41-54, 2011

by Christopher Matthews

“Consuming ‘Little Girls’: How Broadway and New York City Capitalized on Peggy Sawyer and Little Orphan Annie’s Big Apple Dreams”

by Laura MacDonald

Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Spring 2009), pp. 67-89.

Transmission and Recall: the use of short wall anchors in the wide world

by Pat Reynolds

This thesis considers the use of a little-known building technique: short wall anchor construction. Ignored by its... more This thesis considers the use of a little-known building technique: short wall anchor construction. Ignored by its users and misunderstood by many of those who observed it subsequently, the short wall anchor construction technique has proved a useful window into the perception and behaviour of early modern people and subsequent communities.
Using the technology of the late twentieth century: the relational database, digital mapping and the internet I have taken a world-wide approach to analyse and interpret the short wall anchor as a feature
within an assemblage.
This analysis, and a study of the processes and contexts of transmission has demonstrated a close connection between display, narrative and identity and the building façade. Short wall anchors give insight into these practices in the early modern world - the whole world - where new relationships between people, places and things were being forged.
569 pages, 156 illustrations (all in colour), 5 maps (all in colour), 10 tables, bibliograply, CD of entire thesis, including animated maps and database.