Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [553]
O’Callaghan, an expatriate Irish physician and activist in the Catholic emancipation movement, was chosen to compile Brodhead’s documents in part because he himself had published a pioneering History of New Netherland; or New York under the Dutch (D. Appleton, 1846-48). His two-volume study, which ended with the English conquest of 1664, drew on original documents and interviews with old Dutch families in Flatbush and Gravesend, and it came as a revelation to those who had incautiously assumed Irving’s satirical “history” was the real thing.
James Fenimore Cooper set out to follow O’Callaghan’s treatment with a more comprehensive study—oddly enough, given that Cooper’s 1820s enthusiasm for New York City had given way in the 1830s to caustic derogation. Perhaps it was because he believed that Manhattanites, in their infatuation with wealth, displayed an “intensity of selfishness which smothers all recollection of the past” that he began researching Towns of Manhattan, for publication by Putnam. In July 1851, however, with only eight chapters completed, doctors ordered the ailing Cooper to stop writing. He died that September, and the manuscript was later lost in a fire at Putnam’s.
John Romeyn Brodhead stepped into the breach, and Harpers brought out the first of his planned series of volumes in 1853. Brodhead too got only as far as 1664. He’d hoped to get down to 1702, he recalled, but had been tempted by the mass of original documents he’d unearthed, and the volume “in spite of laborious condensation” had “grown unfashionably large.” Daniel Curry’s New-York: A Historical Sketch of the Riseand Progress of the Metropolitan City of America (1853) told more of the tale, but only because his book (he admitted) made “no pretensions to originality, nor yet to deep and thorough research,” as doing so would “have swelled the work to ten times its present volume.” Curry’s study was nevertheless notable for being among the first to advance the Manhattan-as-melting-pot theme. “From whatever point the denizen of that city may have come, a residence in New-York surely and speedily makes him a NEW-YORKER,” Curry asserted, as “New-York energy acts as a solvent to fuse the motley masses that Europe is pouring upon our shores into a consistent body of valuable and happy freemen.”
It was left to Mary Louise Booth to produce the first comprehensive study written in the nineteenth century, A History of the City of New York (1859). Formerly a Williamsburg schoolteacher like her father, Booth had been drawn, at age eighteen, to a literary career, and she moved to Manhattan to be nearer its newspapers and libraries. For several years Booth worked by day as a vestmaker while studying at night and writing without pay for educational and literary journals. Finally she was engaged by the New York Times as a piece-rate reporter on educational and women’s topics.
Booth was commissioned by a group of merchants to write a city history that would combat New Englanders’ denigration of New Yorkers as crassly commercial, while contesting their arrogation of the nation’s historical narrative. She produced an eighthundred-plus-page study; even so, it left out many “curious and interesting events of the past” (she apologized), as their inclusion would have swollen the volumes “to so formidable a size that they would terrify the public.”
Booth argued that pluralistic New York, not provincial New England, best embodied the nation’s history. She hailed Manhattan’s “cosmopolitan character,” so evident “in its freedom from exclusiveness, in its religious tolerance,