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Archive by Topics
History
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18th-century New York, In the Eyes of NYU Scholars
The January 2010 issue of The William and Mary Quarterly contains reviews of recent books by two scholars based at NYU. Both books, Thomas M. Truxes’s Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York and Bryan Waterman’s Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature, [...]
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago 1890
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury’s Chicago 1890 is a slim, engaging study that places a handful of the city’s first skyscrapers, including The Monadnock, the Masonic Temple, and the Reliance Building, in the context of the raucus decade during which they were erected.
David M. Henkin, City Reading
David M. Henkin’s City Reading (Columbia), the last book I read in 2009, comes close to my current ideal of the historian’s first book, offering a novel and ambitious argument within well-defined parameters.
Some Favorite Books Published in 2009
The editors of Frieze magazine invited me to write about some of my favorite books published this year. My response, posted here, was paired with that of Amit Chaudhuri and is published in issue 128 (January-February 2010).
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First Reviews of Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty
The first significant reviews of Gordon Wood’s entry in Oxford’s multi-volume History of the United States are trickling in. Jay Winik, in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, calls Empire of Liberty “the culmination of a lifetime of brilliant thinking and writing” and “as elegant a synopsis of the period as any I know,” [...]
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T.J. Stiles’s The First Tycoon
Last night, T.J. Stiles’s new biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, The First Tycoon, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction from an award committee chaired by Yale historian David Blight. By coincidence I just happened to read a thoughtful, generous (but by no means naive) review-essay about the book written by Steve Fraser. It’s in the [...]
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Sharon Core at the Gallery at Hermès
The last time I wrote about Sharon Core’s photographs I reviewed an exhibition of prints from her series “Early American,” which is based on the still life compositions of the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century painter Raphaelle Peale. New photographs from that series are now on view, of all places, in the Gallery at Hermès on Madison [...]
Timothy Egan, The Big Burn
Stewardship of the land remains as contentious an issue today as it was one hundred years ago, when Theodore Roosevelt laid out his vision for conservation and ran into opposition from corporate lumber and mining interests. In The Big Burn, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Timothy Egan tells the story of Roosevelt’s prophetic vision for America’s landscape and the debates he gleefully exacerbated. The book focuses, with cinematic flair, on the August 1910 forest fire that ravaged three million acres in the northern Rockies, while providing an opportune challenge to the newborn US Forest Service.
Luc Sante, Folk Photography
My interview with Luc Sante, about his new book Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard, 1905-1930 (Yeti/Verse Chorus Press), has just been published on Artforum.com. Click through not only to read his ruminations on this early-twentieth-century phenomenon, but also to see a slide show of additional images from the book. In the course of our [...]
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2010 AHA Meeting Program Online
The program for the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, which will be held in San Diego next January, is now online. There are scores, if not hundreds, of sessions and panel discussions. Based on a cursory look through the list, one trend is particularly clear: ocean and maritime history is enjoying a [...]
Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery
Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge), a sweeping comparative history of slavery and its eradication, is the fruit of Seymour Drescher’s fifty years of scholarship on the topic. As the title indicates, Drescher is particularly interested in abolition, and he therefore examines historical developments based on their effect, whether positive or negative, on the institution of slavery.
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A Search for Tenure-track Security
The September-October issue of Duke Magazine includes a chronicle of Kelly Kennington’s search for a tenure-track position. Kennington, a newly minted history Ph.D. whose dissertation is about slaves who sued for their freedom in St. Louis Circuit Court, prepares meticulously for the job search and is ultimately successful. The details nonetheless remain somewhat harrowing: fifty-four [...]
Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat
This idiosyncratic and entertaining history uses five paintings by Johannes Vermeer and two additional artifacts to explore nascent global trade. Small details in the canvases—the officer’s hat in Officer and Laughing Girl, the globe resting on a cabinet in the background of The Geographer, the silver coins about to be weighed in Woman Holding a Balance—act as “doors,” in Brook’s phrasing, that open onto the seventeenth century.
Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell
Rebecca Solnit agrees with one aspect of commonplace thinking about disasters: once a hurricane’s winds subside, an earthquake’s upheavals abate, or an explosion’s concussive force dissipates, the trouble is far from over. But the premise of Solnit’s forceful new book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, is that nearly everything else we are told about the aftermath of such events is wrong…
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Three Interviews with Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit’s new book A Paradise Built in Hell is receiving a fair amount of press attention, including reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the B&N Review, and elsewhere. Most have been positive; Christine Stanstell’s review in the current New Republic, not yet available at the magazine’s poorly redesigned website, dissents from [...]
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A New Literary History of America
Last night I finally spotted Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors’s A New Literary History of America (Harvard University Press) on bookstore shelves. I’ve been curious about the anthology since the dust jacket for Marcus’s last book, The Shape of Things to Come, mentioned he was at work on it. Just how broadly would Marcus and [...]
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Today in NYC History
Today in NYC History is a new blog from the East Village History Project. Each post contains a paragraph-long description of an event that occurred on this day in history, and the juxtapositions are entertaining. For example, the northeast blackout of 2003 is followed by the laying of the cornerstone of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in [...]
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Dancing in the Dark
Morris Dickstein’s new book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, will be on bookstore shelves in two weeks. I’m looking forward to reading it. Advance publicity is trickling out, including a long interview in Humanities, the journal of the NEH. “There are two rival clichés about the culture of the [...]
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“A Wooden Serpent with a Tail in Its Mouth”
Paul Collins, an entertaining journalist and historian of everything you wouldn’t expect to be recovered by historians, has published an essay in the new issue of New Scientist on moving walkways, including the novel one at the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900 and an attempt a few years later to replicate it, at [...]
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Crooked Timber on George Scialabba
This week the website/community Crooked Timber is holding a symposium on George Scialabba’s new essay collection What Are Intellectuals Good For? (available from Pressed Wafer). Here is the introduction; thus far contributions have come from Michael Berubé, Russell Jacoby, Aaron Swartz, Rich Yeselson, John Holbo, and Scott McLemee (who also profiled Scialabba a few years [...]
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The Memory Palace
Although word about The Memory Palace has made its way around the web in recent months, I only discovered radio journalist Nate DiMeo’s new podcast over the weekend. Each three-to-six-minute episode contains an historical anecdote. DiMeo doesn’t interview historians, doesn’t cite his sources in the stories, and keeps the production values simple. (He hopes “The [...]
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John McPhee
This afternoon I chose to stay in rather than venture out into the thick, sweltering New York air. Having finished my work for the day, I picked up my copy of The John McPhee Reader and read excerpts from a few of his books—Oranges, A Roomful of Hovings and Other Portraits, and Pieces of the [...]
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David S. Brown on the Origins of “Beyond the Frontier”
At HNN, historian David S. Brown discusses how he came to write his recent book Beyond the Frontier, which I mentioned in an earlier post: “Briefly put, reading [Richard] Hofstadter’s critics drew me into an exploration of a midwestern historical consciousness that went ‘beyond the frontier’ thesis popularized by [Frederick Jackson] Turner to reject American [...]
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Second Annual USIH Conference Program Draft
A draft of the program for the second annual US Intellectual History conference has been posted to the USIH blog. It lists a plenary address by James Livingston of Rutgers, a retrospective discussion of John Patrick Diggins, and panels on pragmatism and the Cold War era; the intellectual legacy of the 1960s; the intellectual and [...]
Al Reinert, For All Mankind
The fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission offers an opportunity for reconsideration of the Apollo program; even Buzz Aldrin has gotten into the act, publishing Magnificent Desolation, his second memoir. Criterion has contributed to the effort by releasing on DVD and Blu-Ray Al Reinert’s magnificent 1989 documentary For All Mankind. To make the film, Reinert, a journalist with no prior filmmaking experience, trolled through millions of feet of official Apollo 16-mm footage, then combined his selections with audio recordings extracted from hundreds of hours of interviews with astronauts.
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D.D. Guttenplan, American Radical
This patient recounting of I.F. Stone’s career charts two ascensions punctuated by a sharp downturn. First came the meteoric rise from book-obsessed New Jersey boy named Isidor Feinstein to op-ed columnist for the New York Post with easy access to New Dealers throughout FDR’s administration. The second ascent begins approximately with the launch, in late 1953, of his humble four-page newsletter.
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Midwestern Voices of Dissent
Augmenting the work of scholars of New Left history like Paul Buhle, David S. Brown’s Beyond the Frontier (Chicago) posits a Midwestern voice in American history “distinguished by a typology of progressive thought and politics.” The slim volume links Frederick Jackson Turner (b. 1861), Charles Beard (b. 1874), William Appleman Williams (b. 1921), and Christopher [...]
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The Burnham Plan Centennial
My hometown is celebrating the centennial of Daniel H. Burnham’s Plan of Chicago. The plan, which dramatically reordered the city—concentrating skyscrapers downtown, creating parks along the city’s lakefront, devising broad avenues that radiate outward from the city center—is available online here. As part of the celebration, architects Ben van Berkel and Zaha Hadid have created [...]
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Map: Lost Art of New York
The weblog 16 Miles of String has created a new project that may prove fascinating: a Google Map “documenting the sites of performances, studios, public art installations, residences, and galleries that once existed in New York and now do not.” The list is a little thin at the moment, but they site’s proprietors are seeking [...]
Jia Zhang-ke, 24 City
One of the virtues of Jia Zhang-ke’s recent film 24 City (2008) is that he focuses on particular losses: the psychological and physical wounds inflicted upon the employees of Factory 420 in Chengdu, first under Mao’s regime in the 1960s and 1970s, and then during the shift from a planned economy to a market economy, the effects of which are still being felt today.
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Isaiah Berlin’s Centenary
Yesterday was the centenary of the birth of Isaiah Berlin, the British historian of ideas. To mark the occasion, Henry Hardy, keeper of the Berlin flame, has published in England a second selection of Berlin’s letters, titled Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960. The book has been reviewed by John Gray (who published a biography of Berlin in [...]
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Anthony Grafton on anxiety and deception
“When I sat down to write Forgers and Critics, what I wanted to do was think my way through the long tradition of reasoning about the coherence and character of the past, but I ultimately came to a slightly disturbing conclusion: forgery was deeply rooted in this tradition, as deeply rooted as ways of thinking about [...]
Interview: Damon Rich
Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center began as a broad proposal for the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT about risk, and in particular about the rise of risk management as a form of planning. In the past fifteen to twenty years, it seems like planning focused on concrete visions or goals has given way to planning that catalogues the risks to which one is vulnerable—with the goal of preserving and expanding the status quo.
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Fritz Goro, Science Photographer
“Fritz Goro was the longtime science photographer for LIFE magazine. He covered the Manhattan Project, including shooting at the original Ground Zero. His image of a fetus in an artificial womb inspired Kubrick’s 2001.” [...]
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George Scialabba radio interview
Links to an interview with George Scialabba and a selection of books the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? deem necessary for the critic’s library.
Michael Gross, Rogues’ Gallery
Rather than pay close attention to the merits of individual exhibitions or examine the public’s perception of the institution, Gross revels in the internecine squabbling among Met directors, board members, curators and New York City officials over the growth, acquisitions and public orientation of the museum. The book, akin to a 500-page Vanity Fair article, is an unabashedly unofficial history – Gross makes much of being denied official access to the museum’s archives and its employees [...]