Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898
Author: Edwin G Burrows
To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe.
In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heights, the destructive seven years of British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial center, the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of immigrants, the rise of mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast of thousands--the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich Village from the city'sstreet-grid plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life; and Walt Whitman, who happily celebrated that same life. We meet the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Boss Tweed and his nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis and Horace Greeley; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel Waring and his "white angels" (who revolutionized the sanitation department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their mark on this great city.
The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America, and a book that will mesmerize everyone interested in the peaks and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth. Gotham is a dazzling read, a fast-paced, brilliant narrative that carries the reader along as it threads hundreds of stories into one great blockbuster of a book.
New York Magazine - Ariel Levy
The fruit of 20 years of collective labor . . . .a whopping 1,416 pages (and it's only the first volume!).
ForeWord Magazine - Pete Skinner
Gotham is monumental but never overwhelming: It is the work of master literary masons. The narrative is Romanesque in its integrity and solidity of structure but reflects a Gothic precision in its detailing...The authors' clear and supple prose brings clarity and strength to their treatment of these basic themes. Their insertion of key data and supporting citations into clean, fast-moving prose is masterful. This is history with a beating heart; the players command the stage, the documentation lurks in the wings...no reader will leave Gotham disappointed...For individuals with any interest at all in New York City, this book is an unbeatable investment in knowledge and reward.
Entertainment Weekly
...[A] novelistic narrative...
Timothy J. Gilfoyle
The city's complexity has frightened...historians....few historians today attempt synthetic and comprehensive interpretations of this magnitude....persuasively argue that New York was "crucially shaped by...an evolving global economy" from its foundingas New Amsterdamin 1626....For Burrows and Wallace...New York's story is the nation's. —The Atlantic Monthly
L.A. Times Book Review - Tom Vanderbilt
In their colossal history of New York from its founding until 1898, authors Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace present New York as a city where a sense ofpalce is best understood through time....the narrative of Gotham hovers over the city, drifting along thematic currecnt, occasionally catching a cataclysmic gust; it drops in for a vivid close-up only to reascend, with equal aplomb, for a global panorama.
Library Journal
As grand-scale and ambitious as New York City itself, this book was 20 years in the making, but anyone interested in American or urban history will find it worth the wait. The authors, both New York academics, start with the teeming islands and waterways Europeans first encountered in New York harbor and move right up to the consolidation of the five boroughs to create "an imperial city." An almost frightening amount of research went into preparing the highly detailed text, but the result is a real saga that proves why New York is still the greatest city in the world. (LJ 9/15/98)
Entertainment Weekly
...[A] novelistic narrative...
Bloomsbury Review
Gotham has violence, sex, riots, political corruption, building booms, fires, romance, culture. . . .Extremely well written. . .compelling. . .beats most fiction in its ability to enchant and surprise.
The New Yorker - Paul Goldberger
Gotham is a spectacle, a cavalcade, a parade in which people move on and off the stage with astonishing rapidity, and the scene shifts constantly from politics to fiannce and on to art and social reform and city planning and transportation. The book is at once a history of feminism, of social policy, of marketing, of public works, of health care, of architecture, of government, of religion, of philanthropy, and of culture....A massive scholarly achievement.
The Atlantic Monthly - Timothy J. Gilfoyle
The city's complexity has frightened...historians....few historians today attempt synthetic and comprehensive interpretations of this magnitude....persuasively argue that New York was "crucially shaped by...an evolving global economy" from its founding, as New Amsterdam, in 1626....For Burrows and Wallace...New York's story is the nation's.
What People Are Saying
Kenneth T. Jackson
An epic narrative worthy of the world's greatest city, Gotham is a marvelously-written and sweeping book that is based throughout on the latest scholarship.
— Editor-in-Chief, The Encyclopedia of New York City
Brooke Astor
I was transported back in time. I was fascinated as door after door was mentally opened as I turned page after page. I have never read a book that tells so interestingly who we are and how we got where we are.
Edward Robb Ellis
Gotham is a masterpiece. It is the best history of New York City ever written. It will be read a century from now.
Jane Alexander
If you thought you knew something about the city of New York, think again. Gotham is a page-turner, a fascinating, dramatic and compelling tale of the world's greatest city. You will not walk its streets again without calling to mind the stories that make New York what it is today. The authors have given us a history as real and palpable as if the events just occurred. It is a stunning work.
Rick Burns
There was Melville, Ahab, and the great white whale, and now Burrows and Wallace and this, the first of two massive volumes on what remains perhaps the last great leviathan of American history: New York. There has simply never been anything quite like this extraordinarily ambitious and capacious history of the city. Analytically penetrating; indefatigably scholarly in its painstaking accumulation of detail and event; and for all its size written with remarkable energy and grace, it must stand as the definitive narrative reference work for scholars, students and anyone else obsessed with the endlessly fascinating sprawl of New York's four-century-long history.
Book about: Martha Washingtons Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats or Easy Way to Artisan Breads and Pastries
Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival
Author: Daniel Jaffe
Fair trade is a fast-growing alternative market intended to bring better prices and greater social justice to small farmers around the world. But is it working? This vivid study of coffee farmers in Mexico offers the first thorough investigation of the social, economic, and environmental benefits of fair trade. Based on extensive research in Zapotec indigenous communities in the state of Oaxaca, Brewing Justice follows the members of the cooperative Michiza, whose organic coffee is sold on the international fair trade market. It compares these families to conventional farming families in the same region, who depend on local middlemen and are vulnerable to the fluctuations of the world coffee market. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book carries readers into the lives of these coffee producer households and their communities, offering a nuanced analysis of both the effects of fair trade on everyday life and the limits of its impact. Brewing Justice paints a clear picture of the complex dynamics of the fair trade market and its relationship to the global economy. Drawing on interviews with dozens of fair trade leaders, the book also explores the changing politics of this international movement, including the challenges posed by the entry of transnational corporations into the fair trade system. It concludes by offering recommendations for strengthening and protecting the integrity of fair trade.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures viiList of Tables ix
Preface xi
Introduction 1
A Movement of a Market? 11
Coffee, Commodities, Crisis 36
One Region, Two Markets 58
The Difference a Market Makes: Livelihoods and Labor 93
A Sustainable Cup? Fair Trade, Shade-Grown Coffee, and Organic Production 133
Eating and Staying on the Land: Food Security Migration 165
Dancing with the Devil? 199
"Mejor, Pero No Muy Bien Que Digamos": The Limits of Fair Trade 232
Strengthening Fair Trade 247
Conclusion 259
Acknowledgments 267
Research-Methods 271
Notes 285
Bibliography 307
Index 319
No comments:
Post a Comment