Murder, Inc. and the Moral Life: Gangsters and Gangbusters in La Guardia's New York focuses on the dramatic trials of a group of Brooklyn gangsters in 1940 and 1941. The media nicknamed the gangsters ..."Murder, Inc.," and that nickname quickly became a kind of free-floating "meme," linked at various times to criminals in general; to a record label; and even to a Bruce Springsteen song. The 1940-1941 trials inspired a wave of media coverage, several books and memoirs, and a sub-genre of the gangster film. The trials concluded with a notorious and unsolved murder mystery. Murder, Inc. narrates the life and times of the Brooklyn gang, and also relates their lives both to New York's Roaring Twenties and Depression era gangs and to the wider "gangster" culture expressed especially in the film. At the same time, Murder, Inc., is a moral reflection on the gangsters; the gangbusters, like Fiorello La Guardia and Thomas Dewey, who opposed them; and popular culture's fascination with "gangsterism." It is especially this combination of crime story and moral reflection that makes Murder, Inc. unique.
Choice's Outstanding Academic Title list for 2013
"There is no comparable book on this tunnel. Highly recommended."-Choice Reviews
Every year, more than thirty-three million vehicles traverse the ...Holland Tunnel, making their way to and from Jersey City and Lower Manhattan. From tourists to commuters, many cross the tunnel's 1.6-mile corridor on a daily basis, and yet few know much about this amazing feat of early 20th-century engineering. How was it built, by whom, and at what cost? These and many other questions are answered inHighway Under the Hudson: A History of the Holland Tunnel,Robert W. Jackson's fascinating story about this seminal structure in the history of urban transportation.
Jackson explains the economic forces which led to the need for the tunnel, and details the extraordinary political and social politicking that took place on both sides of the Hudson River to finally enable its construction. He also introduces us to important figures in the tunnel's history, such as New Jersey Governor Walter E. Edge, who, more than anyone else, made the dream of a tunnel a reality and George Washington Goethals (builder of the Panama Canal and namesake of the Goethals Bridge), the first chief engineer of the project.
Fully illustrated with more than 50 beautiful archival photographs and drawings, Jackson's story of the Holland Tunnel is one of great human drama, with heroes and villains, that illustrates how great things are accomplished, and at what price.
Highway Under the Hudsonfeatured in theNew York Times
Listen to Robert Jackson talk about the book on WAMC Radio
New York is often described as the greatest city in the world. Yet much of the iconic architecture and culture which so defines the city as we know it today from the Empire State Building to the ...Pastrami sandwich only came into being in the 1930s, in what
Originally published in 1978. Millions of immigrants seeking a better life came to New York City in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ronald H. Bayor's study details how the relative ...tranquility among the city's four major ethnic groups was disturbed by economic depression, political divisions arising out of ties with the Old Country, and factional strife stirred up by local politicians seeking ethnic votes. Also evaluated are the effects of such emotional and political issues such as Nazism and Fascism upon the allegiances of Germans and Italians; the rift in the ethnic community caused by the communist scare; and the influence of such figures such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Father Charles Coughlin, and Fiorello La Guardia.
Choice's Outstanding Academic Title list for 2013 "There is no comparable book on this tunnel. Highly recommended."—Choice Reviews Every year, more than thirty-three million vehicles traverse the ...Holland Tunnel, making their way to and from Jersey City and Lower Manhattan. From tourists to commuters, many cross the tunnel's 1.6-mile corridor on a daily basis, and yet few know much about this amazing feat of early 20th-century engineering. How was it built, by whom, and at what cost? These and many other questions are answered in Highway Under the Hudson: A History of the Holland Tunnel, Robert W. Jackson's fascinating story about this seminal structure in the history of urban transportation. Jackson explains the economic forces which led to the need for the tunnel, and details the extraordinary political and social politicking that took place on both sides of the Hudson River to finally enable its construction. He also introduces us to important figures in the tunnel's history, such as New Jersey Governor Walter E. Edge, who, more than anyone else, made the dream of a tunnel a reality and George Washington Goethals (builder of the Panama Canal and namesake of the Goethals Bridge), the first chief engineer of the project. Fully illustrated with more than 50 beautiful archival photographs and drawings, Jackson's story of the Holland Tunnel is one of great human drama, with heroes and villains, that illustrates how great things are accomplished, and at what price. Highway Under the Hudson featured in the New York Times Listen to Robert Jackson talk about the book on WAMC Radio
In the years between 1880 and 1915, New York City and its environs underwent a tremendous demographic transformation with the arrival of millions of European immigrants, native whites from the rural ...countryside, and people of African descent from both the American South and the Caribbean. While all groups faced challenges in their adjustment to the city, hardening racial prejudices set the black experience apart from that of other newcomers. Through encounters with each other, blacks and whites, both together and in opposition, forged the contours of race relations that would affect the city for decades to come.Before Harlemreveals how black migrants and immigrants to New York entered a world far less welcoming than the one they had expected to find. White police officers, urban reformers, and neighbors faced off in a hostile environment that threatened black families in multiple ways. Unlike European immigrants, who typically struggled with low-paying jobs but who often saw their children move up the economic ladder, black people had limited employment opportunities that left them with almost no prospects of upward mobility. Their poverty and the vagaries of a restrictive job market forced unprecedented numbers of black women into the labor force, fundamentally affecting child-rearing practices and marital relationships. Despite hostile conditions, black people nevertheless claimed New York City as their own. Within their neighborhoods and their churches, their night clubs and their fraternal organizations, they forged discrete ethnic, regional, and religious communities. Diverse in their backgrounds, languages, and customs, black New Yorkers cultivated connections to others similar to themselves, forming organizations, support networks, and bonds of friendship with former strangers. In doing so, Marcy S. Sacks argues, they established a dynamic world that eventually sparked the Harlem Renaissance. By the 1920s, Harlem had become both a tragedy and a triumph-undeniably a ghetto replete with problems of poverty, overcrowding, and crime, but also a refuge and a haven, a physical place whose very name became legendary.
This biography of George Brinton McClellan Jr., son of the Civil War general by the same name, a congressman, and mayor of New York (1904-1910), studies political courage and honor. The study ...emphasizes McClellan's six years as mayor, but also covers his youth, relationship with the general, his career as a reporter, years as a congressman, and his post-political career, which included his tenure as an economics history professor at Princeton, his brief Army career during World War I, his retirement years in Washington, DC, and burial in Arlington Cemetery.
The establishment of Harlem as the main area of black settlement and as a poor ghetto occurred before the Depression. When the Depression came, the blacks fell still further into poverty. Racism ...created and perpetuated Harlem’s poverty, yet segregation and discrimination also produced strong social and political networks that served not only to meet immediate needs, but to mobilise thousands to demand a better life. In this extensively researched and well argued book, Cheryl Greenberg examines the growth in the 1930s of a widespread, activist, political culture in Harlem.
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