This is the story of an illustrious Romanian-born, Hungarian-speaking, Vienna- schooled, Columbia-educated and Harvard-formed, middle-class Jewish professor of politics and other subjects. Markovits ...revels in a rootlessness that offers him comfort, succor, and the inspiration for his life's work. As we follow his quest to find a home, we encounter his engagement with the important political, social, and cultural developments of five decades on two continents. We also learn about his musical preferences, from classical to rock; his love of team sports such as soccer, baseball, basketball, and American football; and his devotion to dogs and their rescue. Above all, the book analyzes the travails of emigration the author experienced twice, moving from Romania to Vienna and then from Vienna to New York. Markovits's Candide- like travels through the ups and downs of post-1945 Europe and America offer a panoramic view of key currents that shaped the second half of the twentieth century. By shedding light on the cultural similarities and differences between both continents, the book shows why America fascinated Europeans like Markovits and offered them a home that Europe never did: academic excellence, intellectual openness, cultural diversity and religious tolerance. America for Markovits was indeed the "beacon on the hill, " despite the ugliness of its racism, the prominence of its everyday bigotry, the severity of its growing economic inequality, and the presence of other aspects that mar this worthy experiment's daily existence.
Built on an estuary, New York City is rich in population and economic activity but poor in available land to manage the needs of a modern city. Since consolidation of the five boroughs in 1898, New ...York has faced innumerable challenges, from complex water and waste management issues, to housing and feeding millions of residents in a concentrated area, to dealing with climate change in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, and everything in between. Any consideration of sustainable urbanism requires understanding how cities have developed the systems that support modern life and the challenges posed by such a concentrated population. As the largest city in the United States, New York City is an excellent site to investigate these concerns. Featuring an array of the most distinguished and innovative urban environmental historians in the field, Coastal Metropolis offers new insight into how the modern city transformed its air, land, and water as it grew.
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 youth is inseparable from its racialized origins. In the mid-twentieth century, the United States justice system began to focus on punishment, rather than rehabilitation. By the time the federal government began to address the issue of juvenile delinquency, the juvenile justice system shifted its priorities from saving delinquent youth to purely controlling crime, and black teens bore the brunt of the transition.
In New York City, increased state surveillance of predominantly black communities compounded arrest rates during the post–World War II period, providing justification for tough-on-crime policies. Questionable police practices, like stop-and-frisk, combined with media sensationalism, cemented the belief that black youth were the primary cause for concern. Even before the War on Crime, the stakes were clear: race would continue to be the crucial determinant in American notions of crime and delinquency, and black youths condemned with a stigma of criminality would continue to confront the overwhelming power of the state.
On the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, the most
important moment in LGBTQ history-depicted by the people who
influenced, recorded, and reacted to it. June 28, 1969,
Greenwich Village: The New ...York City Police Department, fueled by
bigoted liquor licensing practices and an omnipresent backdrop of
homophobia and transphobia, raided the Stonewall Inn, a
neighborhood gay bar, in the middle of the night. The raid was met
with a series of responses that would go down in history as the
most galvanizing period in this country's fight for sexual and
gender liberation: a riotous reaction from the bar's patrons and
surrounding community, followed by six days of protests. Across 200
documents, Marc Stein presents a unique record of the lessons and
legacies of Stonewall. Drawing from sources that include
mainstream, alternative, and LGBTQ media, gay-bar guide listings,
state court decisions, political fliers, first-person accounts,
song lyrics, and photographs, Stein paints an indelible portrait of
this pivotal moment in the LGBT movement. In The Stonewall
Riots , Stein does not construct a neatly quilted, streamlined
narrative of Greenwich Village, its people, and its protests;
instead, he allows multiple truths to find their voices and speak
to one another, much like the conversations you'd expect to
overhear in your neighborhood bar. Published on the fiftieth
anniversary of the moment the first brick (or shot glass?) was
thrown, The Stonewall Riots allows readers to take stock
of how LGBTQ life has changed in the US, and how it has stayed the
same. It offers campy stories of queer resistance, courageous
accounts of movements and protests, powerful narratives of police
repression, and lesser-known stories otherwise buried in the
historical record, from an account of ball culture in the
mid-sixties to a letter by Black Panther Huey P. Newton addressed
to his brothers and sisters in the resistance. For anyone committed
to political activism and social justice, The Stonewall
Riots provides a much-needed resource for renewal and
empowerment.
A fascinating and beautifully illustrated volume that explains what street trees tell us about humanity's changing relationship with nature and the cityToday, cities around the globe are planting ...street trees to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, as landscape historian Sonja Dümpelmann explains, this is not a new phenomenon. In her eye-opening work, Dümpelmann shows how New York City and Berlin began systematically planting trees to improve the urban climate during the nineteenth century, presenting the history of the practice within its larger social, cultural, and political contexts.A unique integration of empirical research and theory, Dümpelmann's richly illustrated work uncovers this important untold story. Street trees-variously regarded as sanitizers, nuisances, upholders of virtue, economic engines, and more-reflect the changing relationship between humans and nonhuman nature in urban environments. Offering valuable insights and frameworks, this authoritative volume will be an important resource for years to come.
City governments are rapidly becoming society's problem solvers. As Sara Hughes shows, nowhere is this more evident than in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto, where the cities' governments are ...taking on the challenge of addressing climate change. Repowering Cities focuses on the specific issue of reducing urban greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and develops a new framework for distinguishing analytically and empirically the policy agendas city governments develop for reducing GHG emissions, the governing strategies they use to implement these agendas, and the direct and catalytic means by which they contribute to climate change mitigation. Hughes uses her framework to assess the successes and failures experienced in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto as those agenda-setting cities have addressed climate change. She then identifies strategies for moving from incremental to transformative change by pinpointing governing strategies able to mobilize the needed resources and actors, build participatory institutions, create capacity for climate-smart governance, and broaden coalitions for urban climate change policy.
"In this remarkable interdisciplinary study, anthropologist Brian Noble traces how dinosaurs and their natural worlds are articulated into being by the action of specimens and humans together. ...Following the complex exchanges of palaeontologists, museums specialists, film- and media-makers, science fiction writers, and their diverse publics, he witnesses how fossil remains are taken from their partial state and re-composed into astonishingly precise, animated presences within the modern world, with profound political consequences."--
"Articulating Dinosaurs examines the resurrecting of two of the most iconic and gendered of dinosaurs. First Noble traces the emergence of Tyrannosaurus rex (the "king of the tyrant lizards") in the early twentieth-century scientific, literary, and filmic cross-currents associated with the American Museum of Natural History under the direction of palaeontologist and eugenicist Henry Fairfield Osborn. Then he offers his detailed ethnographic study of the multi-media, model-making, curatorial, and laboratory preparation work behind the Royal Ontario Museum's ground-breaking 1990s exhibit of Maiasaura (the "good mother lizard"). Setting the exhibits at the AMNH and the ROM against each other, Noble is able to place the political natures of T. rex and Maiasaura into high relief and to raise vital questions about how our choices make a difference in what comes to count as "nature." An original and illuminating study of science, culture, and museums, Articulating Dinosaurs is a remarkable look at not just how we visualize the prehistoric past, but how we make it palpable it our everyday lives."--
A dazzling dual portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright and early twentieth-century New York, revealing the city's role in establishing the career of America's most famous architectFrank Lloyd Wright ...(1867-1959) took his first major trip to New York in 1909, fleeing a failed marriage and artistic stagnation. He returned a decade later, his personal life and architectural career again in crisis. Booming 1920s New York served as a refuge, but it also challenged him and resurrected his career. The city connected Wright with important clients and commissions that would harness his creative energy and define his role in modern architecture, even as the stock market crash took its toll on his benefactors. Wright denounced New York as an "unlivable prison" even as he reveled in its culture. The city became an urban foil for Wright's work in the desert and in the "organic architecture" he promoted as an alternative to American Art Deco and the International Style. New York became a major protagonist at the end of Wright's life, as he spent his final years at the Plaza Hotel working on the Guggenheim Museum, the building that would cement his legacy. Anthony Alofsin has broken new ground by mining the recently opened Wright archives held by Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art. His foundational research provides a crucial and innovative understanding of Wright's life, his career, and the conditions that enabled his success. The result is at once a stunning biography and a glittering portrait of early twentieth-century Manhattan.
Since its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century as the nation's "metropolis," New York has faced the most challenging housing problems of any American city, but it has also led the nation in ...innovation and reform. The horrors of the tenement were perfected in New York at the same time that the very rich were building palaces along Fifth Avenue; public housing for the poor originated in New York, as did government subsidies for middle-class housing. A standard in the field since its publication in 1992, A History of Housing in New York City traces New York's housing development from 1850 to the present in text and profuse illustrations. Richard Plunz explores the housing of all classes, with comparative discussion of the development of types ranging from the single-family house to the high-rise apartment tower. His analysis is placed within the context of the broader political and cultural development of New York City. This revised edition extends the scope of the book into the city's recent history, adding three decades to the study, covering the recent housing bubble crisis, the rebound and gentrification of the five boroughs, and the ecological issues facing the next generation of New Yorkers. More than 300 illustrations are integrated throughout the text, depicting housing plans, neighborhood changes, and city architecture over the past 130 years. This new edition also features a foreword by the distinguished urban historian Kenneth T. Jackson.
