Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [981]
Businessmen and professionals would continue their efforts, intermittently suecessful, to wrest control of municipal politics from Tammany Hall, while middle-class reformers would struggle to refurbish the civic order by consolidating the agencies of public health, law enforcement, housing, welfare, and schooling.
A new generation of socialists, unionists, feminists, artists, African-American activists, and settlement workers would come together: to criticize corporate power; to protest and improve working conditions in shops and factories; to suffer from and fight against unemployment, poverty, and high rents; to organize a series of mammoth general strikes that would force Tammany into taking up a progressive agenda; to promote a radical assault against the ramparts of genteel culture; to win suffrage for women; and, after a race riot in 1900, to generate a civil rights coalition that would contest Jim Crow at home and throughout the country.
New York’s financiers and industrialists, finally, would steadily expand New York’s imperial outreach, their efforts reaching an apotheosis during the First World War, when the United States was transformed from a debtor to a creditor nation and its leading metropolis began to replace London as the fulcrum of the global economy, emerging as heir presumptive to the tide of Capital of the World.
References
INTRODUCTION TO SOURCES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
A synthesizer, looking back, sees a thief’s shadow. Our book draws upon thousands of studies made by myriad specialists who in the last generation have rewritten the city’s history. It is they who produced the strands of scholarship that we have woven into a narrative.
In the resource notes that follow, we have space to offer only the most truncated acknowledgment of the immense debt we owe those upon whose research and insights we have relied. The alphabetized author and date listings are intended only to suggest those works we found most valuable in sorting our way through the subject of each particular section. This approach does not allow us to differentiate between those interpretations we support and follow and those which we disagree with but nevertheless consider provocative or informative. Under these circumstances, it is more important than usual to insist that those we cite are to be held blameless for our infelicities of analysis and errors of fact. As to the latter, we acknowledge that this work, by its very scope, will inevitably contain mistakes and misstatements, and we invite correction and comment (bouquets as well as brickbats). Readers can email us at gotham@oup-usa.org.
Finally, a note, for those who might be interested, about the nature of our scholarly collaboration. It began a quarter century ago, when we jointly wrote, in 1972, a lengthy essay on the American Revolution. In the early 1980s, we embarked on this study of New York City. The end product is the result not only of years of discussion and debate but of decades of mutual support and sustenance without which this daunting enterprise would never have come to fruition. Our method of work involved one of us doing the reading, researching, structuring, and writing of a chapter, then passing it to the other, whose commentary, critique, and at times additional research, new writing, or rewriting, would inform the second, third, or however many drafts it took until both partners were basically satisfied with the result. The authors’ contributions of intellect and energy are therefore so interlaced that each page bears the mark of their affiliation.
Practical considerations, however, demanded a rough division of labor and attained expertise. Accordingly, Burrows took primary