Archive by Tag
New York
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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 [...]
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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, [...]
Chatter on New York’s streets, circa 1962
Yesterday afternoon, during a conference held at Columbia University on Lionel Trilling and his legacy, the eminent historian Fritz Stern recalled one day in 1962, during the Cuban Missile crisis, when he met Trilling on the corner of Broadway and 116th Street. Unsure whether nuclear missiles would rain down on New York, Stern cautiously admitted [...]
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Platform for Pedagogy
Platform for Pedagogy is a weekly e-mail newsletter listing an interdisciplinary mix of lectures in New York City. According to its website: “Platform for Pedagogy is an initiative to advance a culture of cross-disciplinary public lecture attendance and to develop the lecture as practice. We deal exclusively with public lectures.” For two years I have maintained [...]
