Archive by Topics
History
“Weegee: Murder Is My Business”
An excerpt from and link to my review of “Weegee: Murder Is My Business,” an exhibition at the International Center of Photography.
“The Greatest Grid”
An excerpt from my review of “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011,” on view at the Museum of the City of New York.
“The Black Power Mixtape, 1967-75″
The visual record of the civil rights and black power era has not been significantly expanded in recent years, which makes the recent discovery of hours of documentary footage captured by Swedish television journalists all the more special.
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Ferguson and Faust
Does Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester United coach and Civil War buff, know he met one of the war’s foremost scholars?
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Foner and McGirr, eds, American History Now
American History Now is an imaginative overhauling of the invaluable sourcebook of essays on recent developments in American history, increasing the total number of texts and dividing them roughly evenly between accounts ordered chronologically and those ordered thematically.
“Hiroshima Ground Zero”
The mushroom cloud is the icon of the nuclear age. It is much harder, however, to picture what the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked like. This is not for lack of visual evidence. The presentation at the International Center of Photography of several dozen photographs from the USSBS archive is therefore a chance to become better acquainted with the fearsome power at human disposal.
O. Winston Link
Link was a commercial photographer based in New York whose early love of trains was resuscitated while he was on assignment in 1955, when he took a side trip to watch a steam engine pass through town. Fascinated by the hulking machine and realizing that the Norfolk and Western lines comprised, as the exhibition title suggests, “The Last Steam Railroad in America,” Link tried to capture the tail end of the country’s century-long devotion to steam-powered travel.
H.W. Brands, American Colossus
Brands’s briskly paced, accessible book features the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Pierpont Morgan, American Colossus is not a fine-grained history of the business revolution they wrought or its effects on American workers. It is instead a broad survey of the period that uses “the triumph of capitalism” as a loose interpretive framework.
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Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind
In recent weeks I’ve found myself thinking frequently about Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, an experimental 2008 documentary by filmmaker John Gianvito. I saw it that summer at Anthology Film Archives, and was happy to learn that this hour-long plaintive meditation on radical American history—and how it has been encoded in the country’s landscape—is available as a free online stream at SnagFilms.
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Blogging the Civil War
Huge fanfare surrounded the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in February 2009—and occasioned a flood of books on our sixteenth president. (Here is Sean Wilentz’s controversial take on seven of them.) The ruckus has hardly died down, yet historians of nineteenth-century America are once again being tapped by newspaper opinion pages, this time to commemorate [...]
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The Original Tea Party
Why not spend this election day reading Benjamin L. Carp’s Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & the Making of America (Yale University Press)?
Interview: Susie Linfield
My brief interview with Susie Linfield, director of NYU’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism program, has been published online at Artforum.com. She discusses her remarkable new book The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence.
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Reconsidering Christopher Lasch
One of my summer goals is to read (or re-read) several of Christopher Lasch’s books, from The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963 (1965) to The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1994), as a prelude to reading Eric Miller’s new biography of Lasch, Hope in a Scattering Time. Reviews of Miller’s study [...]
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Christopher Gray’s “Streetscapes”
For several years I have enjoyed Christopher Gray’s “Streetscapes” column in the New York Times. This morning, looking online, I discovered Gray has been writing about buildings and blocks in New York for over two decades. These pieces comprise a huge and diverting archive, from which I learned, for example, that until the early 1990s [...]
“Alan B. Stone and the Senses of Place”
Published in Artforum, May 2010. The exhibition remains on view at the International Center of Photography in New York until May 9. For more information, click here. We’re drawn to the past for countless reasons and revisit it in myriad ways, but analytic, interrogative approaches to what has come before us predominate in today’s art [...]
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John Gray on The Shock of the Global
John Gray has written the first review I’ve seen of The Shock of the Global (Harvard), an anthology of historians’ writings about the 1970s edited by a super-group of three Harvard-based historians and a colleague from Berkeley. His assessment: “While what one contributor calls ‘the declining autonomy of the United States in international affairs’ is [...]
Albert C. Barnes Before His Gallery
“One unique venture should be noticed,” Peffer continues, “not because it has a general application to this field but because it is an interesting example of what may be done under special conditions. The Barnes Foundation of Philadelphia is the educational outgrowth of the A.C. Barnes Company, manufacturing chemists., but it is primarily the product of a unique personality…” So begins Nathaniel Peffer’s 1926 introduction to an aspect of Albert C. Barnes’s educational efforts of which I was previously unaware.
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John Vachon and the FSA
I just enjoyed John Vachon’s charming memoir of being introduced to photography by Roy Striker, head of the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration and amasser of 250,000 images of America taken between 1935 and 1944. (Those who have access to the Harper’s online archive can read the September 1973 piece here.) After working [...]
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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 [...]
