New York

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• SOURCE: NY Times
  5/14/19
  

  A Whitewashed Monument to Women’s Suffrage

  by Brent Staples

  A sculpture that’s expected to be unveiled in Central Park next year ignores the important contributions of black women.

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• 5/12/19
  

  The Remarkable History of the Union League Club

  by Michael Hogan

  Few remember the pivotal role played by a small social club in New York City during the Civil War and beyond. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/27/19
  

  Selling Condoms or Pet Food? An Unexpected Bible of Million-Dollar Opportunities

  Since 1873, the City of New York has put out a daily paper that is essential reading for those who want to do business with the city.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  3/22/19
  

  How New York’s new monument whitewashes the women’s rights movement

  by Martha S. Jones

  It offers a narrow vision of the activists who fought for equality.

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• SOURCE: Them
  3/5/19
  

  Historian Hugh Ryan's New Book Documents the Queer History of Brooklyn

  by Hugh Ryan

  From a gay Nazi spy sex scandal to its WWII antifascist queer intelligentsia scene, a new book reveals that Brooklyn has always been a surprisingly queer haven.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/23/19
  

  The Horrors of Auschwitz at a Museum in New York

  “This exhibit reminds them, and it reminds all of us, where anti-Semitism ultimately leads."

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• SOURCE: Smithsonian
  6-21-18
  

  New York Is Building a New Monument to Women’s History—And It Wants the Public’s Help

  A new initiative titled She Built NYC is asking New Yorkers to recommend potential subjects for the monument.

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• SOURCE: The Oneida Daily Dispatch
  5-16-17
  

  State legislators roll out bill ordering a one-year study of the impact of slavery in New York

  “Most people believe that slavery was a southern thing, it was mostly southern states,” he said, but most do not know New York City had more slaves than any city in the U.S. beside Charleston, S.C

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• SOURCE: NYT
  1-1-16
  

  Conjuring the Magic in New York’s Past

  A magician named Belinda Sinclair offers visitors performances that weave in lessons on the women who held séances in the area a century ago.

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• 7-7-15
  

  On Wall Street: Slavery Lost, Found, and Remembered

  by Pearl Duncan

  The slave market that once existed on Wall Street is long gone. But we shouldn’t let absence define our memory.

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• SOURCE: Vox
  1-26-15
  

  New York's 1888 blizzard had smallpox, bonfires, and rubber boot shortages

  It was a terrifying experience for the people there, in part, because so many things went horribly, unexpectedly wrong.

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• SOURCE: Gizmodo
  1-8-15
  

  The Plan to Build a Mega-Manhattan That Failed, Thank God

  A Really Greater New York. That was the title of the 1911 proposal by an engineer and planner who imagined paving over massive amounts of New York Harbor to make room to build the New York of the future.

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• 10-19-14
  

  Why I Stand by What I Wrote About the Dutch

  by Russell Shorto

  It goes without saying that the Dutch founders of New York were bigoted—just like all Europeans of the time. But they also laid the roots of tolerance.

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• 10-5-14
  

  This Is What Mythologizing History Looks Like in 2014

  by Alan Singer

  It’s time to call out mythologizing when we see it.

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• SOURCE: NYT
  9-7-14
  

  The Source of New York’s Greatness

  by Russell Shorto

  Dutch tolerance was transplanted to Manhattan: They were so welcoming that a reported 18 languages were spoken in New Amsterdam at a time when its population was only about 500.

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• SOURCE: The National
  9-21-2013
  

  In New York's Little Syria, a Fight to Preserve the Past

  Developers of the September 11 Memorial Museum neglect Little Syria, a nearby New York neighborhood, forcing Arab Americans to fight for their presence in United States' history.

• SOURCE: Bloomberg News
  8-14-13
  

  Stephen Mihm: New York Had a Hyperloop First, Elon Musk

  Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia, is a contributor to the Ticker. Follow him on TwitterAh, the “hyperloop.” Elon Musk, whose track record as a technological visionary is unimpeachable, has released details of his plan for a futuristic system of transport. The basic idea is to use air pressure to shoot people-carrying pods through tubes at speeds of up to 760 miles per hour.With all due respect to Mr. Musk, the idea isn’t new. This has been pointed out by some commentators, who have noted that in 1972 Rand Corporation researcher R. M. Salter released a proposal to ferry passengers from New York to Los Angles in a mere 21 minutes, or 14 minutes less than the hyperloop would take to send them from Los Angeles to San Francisco. But at its heart, Musk’s project is even more old school: It owes most of its inspiration to ideas that have been around for two hundred years.

• SOURCE: WSJ
  8-10-13
  

  NY marking state historic site's 1913 acquisition

  LITTLE FALLS, N.Y. — State parks officials and history buffs will gather at a historic site in the Mohawk Valley to mark the 100th anniversary of the property's acquisition by New York.Sunday afternoon's event is being held at the Herkimer Home State Historic site in Little Falls, 60 miles west of Albany.Gen. Nicholas Herkimer completed construction of his Georgian-style mansion after the French and Indian War ended in 1763, when the Mohawk Valley was New York's frontier. During the Revolutionary War, in August 1777, Herkimer was leading hundreds of American militiamen en route to relieve the siege at Fort Stanwix in present-day Rome when they were ambushed at Oriskany by a force British, loyalist and Indians....

• Veterans group, flying Gadsden flag, ruffles a city

  NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y. — The way Moises Valencia describes things, it began with a simple idea.Seeing that the American flag flying outside the old military armory in the city needed replacing, he took it upon himself to contact local veterans about putting up a new one. For good measure, he shelled out about $16 online for a yellow Gadsden flag, bearing an image that dates back to 1775, of a coiled rattlesnake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me,” in case the veterans wanted to use that one, too.The way city officials see things, a group whose agendas go beyond purely patriotic ones decided to use a public space, the flagpole at the city-owned armory, to fly a banner that has come to symbolize the Tea Party and antipathy to government....

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• Slave Revolt Rides on Broken Down Railroad

  by Bruce Chadwick

  Tellin’ Man Midtown International Theater Festival Dorothy Strelsin Theater 312 W. 36th Street New York, N.Y. Each summer, the festival stages fifty or so plays of different varieties at the midtown theater complex.There were five well known slave revolts in America prior to the Civil War: in New York in 1712, along the Stono River, in South Carolina, in 1740, in Richmond, Virginia in 1800, the Denmark Vesey revolt in Charleston in 1822 and the Nat Turner revolt in Virginia in 1831. Paul Gray’s new play, Tellin’ Man seems to be based most closely on the rebellion led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800. In Gray’s play, as in the Prosser revolt, other slaves secretly told the owners of the rebellion and the slave owners worked with law enforcement to quash it.The Tellin’ Man is the story of James, who betrayed his fellow slaves, and what happened to him, his family and his friends after the leaders of the revolt were arrested. It is a narrow focus play about slavery and the eternal hope of those in bondage that they could be free.