Download or read book Unearthing Gotham written by Anne-Marie E. Cantwell and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2003-10-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under the teeming metropolis that is present-day New York City lie the buried remains of long-lost worlds. The remnants of nineteenth-century New York reveal much about its inhabitants and neighborhoods, from fashionable Washington Square to the notorious Five Points. Underneath there are traces of the Dutch and English colonists who arrived in the area in the seventeenth century, as well as of the Africans they enslaved. And beneath all these layers is the land that Native Americans occupied for hundreds of generations from their first arrival eleven thousand years ago. Now two distinguished archaeologists draw on the results of more than a century of excavations to relate the interconnected stories of these different peoples who shared and shaped the land that makes up the modern city. In treating New York's five boroughs as one enormous archaeological site, Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall weave Native American, colonial, and post-colonial history into an absorbing, panoramic narrative. They also describe the work of the archaeologists who uncovered this evidence--nineteenth-century pioneers, concerned citizens, and today's professionals. In the process, Cantwell and Wall raise provocative questions about the nature of cities, urbanization, the colonial experience, Indian life, the family, and the use of space. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, Unearthing Gotham offers a fresh perspective on the richness of the American legacy.

Download or read book Gotham Unbound written by Theodore Steinberg and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the history of New York City as it was transformed over a four-hundred-year period by politicians and developers from a Hudson River estuary with rolling hills, rivers, and forests into the concrete flatland that exists today.

Download or read book Touring Gotham s Archaeological Past written by Diana diZerega Wall and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: div This pocket-sized guidebook takes the reader on eight walking tours to archaeological sites throughout the boroughs of New York City and presents a new way of exploring the city through the rich history that lies buried beneath it. Generously illustrated and replete with maps, the tours are designed to explore both ancient times and modern space. On these tours, readers will see where archaeologists have discovered evidence of the earliest New Yorkers, the Native Americans who arrived at least 11,000 years ago. They will learn about thousand-year-old trading routes, sacred burial grounds, and seventeenth-century villages. They will also see sites that reveal details of the lives of colonial farmers and merchants, enslaved Africans, Revolutionary War soldiers, and nineteenth-century hotel keepers, grocers, and housewives. Some tours bring readers to popular tourist attractions (the Statue of Liberty and the Wall Street district, for example) and present them in a new light. Others center on places that even the most seasoned New Yorker has never seen—colonial houses, a working farm, out-of-the-way parks, and remote beaches—often providing beautiful and unexpected views from the city’s vast shoreline. A celebration of New York City’s past and its present, this unique book will intrigue everyone interested in the city and its history. /DIV

Download or read book Black Gotham written by Carla L. Peterson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrates the story of the elite African American families who lived in New York City in the nineteenth century, describing their successes as businesspeople and professionals and the contributions they made to the culture of that time period.

Download or read book City at the Water s Edge written by Betsy McCully and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concrete floors and concrete walls, buildings that pierce the sky, taxicabs and subway corridors, a steady din of noise. These things, along with a virtually unrivaled collection of museums, galleries, performance venues, media outlets, international corporations, and stock exchanges make New York City not only the cultural and financial capital of the United States, but one of the largest and most impressive urban conglomerations in the world. With distinctions like these, is it possible to imagine the city as any more than this? City at the Water's Edge invites readers to do just that. Betsy McCully, a long-time urban dweller, argues that this city of lights is much more than a human-made metropolis. It has a rich natural history that is every bit as fascinating as the glitzy veneer that has been built atop it. Through twenty years of nature exploration, McCully has come to know New York as part of the Lower Hudson Bioregion-a place of salt marshes and estuaries, sand dunes and barrier islands, glacially sculpted ridges and kettle holes, rivers and streams, woodlands and outwash plains. Here she tells the story of New York that began before the first humans settled in the region twelve thousand years ago, and long before immigrants ever arrived at Ellis Island. The timeline that she recounts is one that extends backward half a billion years; it plumbs the depths of Manhattan's geological history and forecasts a possible future of global warming, with rising seas lapping at the base of the Empire State Building. Counter to popular views that see the city as a marvel of human ingenuity diametrically opposed to nature, this unique account shows how the region has served as an evolving habitat for a diversity of species, including our own. The author chronicles the growth of the city at the expense of the environment, but leaves the reader with a vision of a future city as a human habitat that is brought into balance with nature.

Download or read book Death in the New World written by Erik R. Seeman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-09-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reminders of death were everywhere in the New World, from the epidemics that devastated Indian populations and the mortality of slaves working the Caribbean sugar cane fields to the unfamiliar diseases that afflicted Europeans in the Chesapeake and West Indies. According to historian Erik R. Seeman, when Indians, Africans, and Europeans encountered one another, they could not ignore the similarities in their approaches to death. All of these groups believed in an afterlife to which the soul or spirit traveled after death. As a result all felt that corpses—the earthly vessels for the soul or spirit—should be treated with respect, and all mourned the dead with commemorative rituals. Seeman argues that deathways facilitated communication among peoples otherwise divided by language and custom. They observed, asked questions about, and sometimes even participated in their counterparts' rituals. At the same time, insofar as New World interactions were largely exploitative, the communication facilitated by parallel deathways was often used to influence or gain advantage over one's rivals. In Virginia, for example, John Smith used his knowledge of Powhatan deathways to impress the local Indians with his abilities as a healer as part of his campaign to demonstrate the superiority of English culture. Likewise, in the 1610-1614 war between Indians and English, the Powhatans mutilated English corpses because they knew this act would horrify their enemies. Told in a series of engrossing narratives, Death in the New World is a landmark study that offers a fresh perspective on the dynamics of cross-cultural encounters and their larger ramifications in the Atlantic world.

Download or read book Draft Management Recommendations for the African Burial Ground written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Gastropolis written by Annie Hauck-Lawson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-13 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An irresistible sampling of the city's rich food heritage, Gastropolis explores the personal and historical relationship between New Yorkers and food. Beginning with the origins of New York's fusion cuisine, such as Mt. Olympus bagels and Puerto Rican lasagna, the book describes the nature of food and drink before the arrival of Europeans in 1624 and offers a history of early farming practices. Specially written essays trace the function of place and memory in Asian cuisine, the rise of Jewish food icons, the evolution of food enterprises in Harlem, the relationship between restaurant dining and identity, and the role of peddlers and markets in guiding the ingredients of our meals. They share spice-scented recollections of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, and colorful vignettes of the avant-garde chefs, entrepreneurs, and patrons who continue to influence the way New Yorkers eat.

Download or read book The Saltwater Frontier written by Andrew Lipman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Andrew Lipman’s eye-opening first book is the previously untold story of how the ocean became a “frontier” between colonists and Indians. When the English and Dutch empires both tried to claim the same patch of coast between the Hudson River and Cape Cod, the sea itself became the arena of contact and conflict. During the violent European invasions, the region’s Algonquian-speaking Natives were navigators, boatbuilders, fishermen, pirates, and merchants who became active players in the emergence of the Atlantic World. Drawing from a wide range of English, Dutch, and archeological sources, Lipman uncovers a new geography of Native America that incorporates seawater as well as soil. Looking past Europeans’ arbitrary land boundaries, he reveals unseen links between local episodes and global events on distant shores. Lipman’s book “successfully redirects the way we look at a familiar history” (Neal Salisbury, Smith College). Extensively researched and elegantly written, this latest addition to Yale’s seventeenth-century American history list brings the early years of New England and New York vividly to life.

Download or read book Digging in the City of Brotherly Love written by Rebecca Yamin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beneath the modern city of Philadelphia lie countless clues to its history and the lives of residents long forgotten. This intriguing book explores eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Philadelphia through the findings of archaeological excavations, sharing with readers the excitement of digging into the past and reconstructing the lives of earlier inhabitants of the city.Urban archaeologist Rebecca Yamin describes the major excavations that have been undertaken since 1992 as part of the redevelopment of Independence Mall and surrounding areas, explaining how archaeologists gather and use raw data to learn more about the ordinary people whose lives were never recorded in history books. Focusing primarily on these unknown citizens-an accountant in the first Treasury Department, a coachmaker whose clients were politicians doing business at the State House, an African American founder of St. Thomas’s African Episcopal Church, and others-Yamin presents a colorful portrait of old Philadelphia. She also discusses political aspects of archaeology today-who supports particular projects and why, and what has been lost to bulldozers and heedlessness. Digging in the City of Brotherly Love tells the exhilarating story of doing archaeology in the real world and using its findings to understand the past.

Download or read book The Ship That Held Up Wall Street written by Warren Curtis Riess and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-14 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In January 1982, archaeologists conducting a pre-construction excavation at 175 Water Street in Lower Manhattan found the remains of an eighteenth-century ship. Uncertain of what they had found or what its value might be, they called in two nautical archaeologists—Warren Riess and Sheli Smith—to direct the excavation and analysis of the ship’s remains. As it turned out, the mystery ship’s age and type meant that its careful study would help answer some important questions about the commerce and transportation of an earlier era of American history. The Ship that Held Up Wall Street tells the whole story of the discovery, excavation, and study of what came to be called the “Ronson ship site,” named for the site’s developer, Howard Ronson. Entombed for more than two hundred years, the Princess Carolina proved to be the first major discovery of a colonial merchant ship. Years of arduous analytical work have led to critical breakthroughs revealing how the ship was designed and constructed, its probable identity as a vessel built in Charleston, South Carolina, its history as a merchant ship, and why and how it came to be buried in Manhattan.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Childhood written by Sally Crawford and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Real understanding of past societies is not possible without including children, and yet they have been strangely invisible in the archaeological record. Compelling explanation about past societies cannot be achieved without including and investigating children and childhood. However marginal the traces of children's bodies and bricolage may seem compared to adults, archaeological evidence of children and childhood can be found in the most astonishing places and spaces. The archaeology of childhood is one of the most exciting and challenging areas for new discovery about past societies. Children are part of every human society, but childhood is a cultural construct. Each society develops its own idea about what a childhood should be, what children can or should do, and how they are trained to take their place in the world. Children also play a part in creating the archaeological record itself. In this volume, experts from around the world ask questions about childhood - thresholds of age and growth, childhood in the material culture, the death of children, and the intersection of the childhood and the social, economic, religious, and political worlds of societies in the past.

Download or read book Sea Log written by May Joseph and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-24 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ocean has always been the harbinger of strangers to new shores. Migrations by sea have transformed modern conceptions of mobility and belonging, disrupting notions of how to write about movement, memory and displaced histories. Sea Log is a memory theater of repressive hauntings based on urban artifacts across a maritime archive of Dutch and Portuguese colonial pillage. Colonial incursions from the sea, and the postcolonial aftershocks of these violent sea histories, lie largely forgotten for most formerly colonized coastal communities around the world. Offering a feminist log of sea journeys from the Malabar Coast of South India, through the Atlantic to the North Sea, May Joseph writes a navigational history of postcolonial coastal displacements. Excavating Dutch, Portuguese, Arab, Asian and African influences along the Malabar Coast, Joseph unearths the undertow of colonialism’s ruins. In Sea Log, the Bosphorus, the Tagus and the Amstel find coherence alongside the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Written in a clear and direct style, this volume will appeal to historians of transnational communities, as well as students and scholars of cultural studies, anthropology of space, area studies, maritime history and postcolonial studies.

Download or read book Fluid New York written by May Joseph and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hurricane Sandy was a fierce demonstration of the ecological vulnerability of New York, a city of islands. Yet the storm also revealed the resilience of a metropolis that has started during the past decade to reckon with its aqueous topography. In Fluid New York, May Joseph describes the many ways that New York, and New Yorkers, have begun to incorporate the city's archipelago ecology into plans for a livable and sustainable future. For instance, by cleaning its tidal marshes, the municipality has turned a previously dilapidated waterfront into a space for public leisure and rejuvenation. Joseph considers New York's relation to the water that surrounds and defines it. Her reflections reach back to the city's heyday as a world-class port—a past embodied in a Dutch East India Company cannon recently unearthed from the rubble at the World Trade Center site—and they encompass the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. They suggest that New York's future lies in the reclamation of its great water resources—for artistic creativity, civic engagement, and ecological sustainability.

Download or read book Crossing Broadway written by Robert W. Snyder and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert W. Snyder's Crossing Broadway tells how disparate groups overcame their mutual suspicions to rehabilitate housing, build new schools, restore parks, and work with the police to bring safety to streets racked by crime and fear. It shows how a neighborhood once nicknamed "Frankfurt on the Hudson" for its large population of German Jews became "Quisqueya Heights"—the home of the nation's largest Dominican community. The story of Washington Heights illuminates New York City's long passage from the Great Depression and World War II through the urban crisis to the globalization and economic inequality of the twenty-first century. Washington Heights residents played crucial roles in saving their neighborhood, but its future as a home for working-class and middle-class people is by no means assured. The growing gap between rich and poor in contemporary New York puts new pressure on the Heights as more affluent newcomers move into buildings that once sustained generations of wage earners and the owners of small businesses. Crossing Broadway is based on historical research, reporting, and oral histories. Its narrative is powered by the stories of real people whose lives illuminate what was won and lost in northern Manhattan's journey from the past to the present. A tribute to a great American neighborhood, this book shows how residents learned to cross Broadway—over the decades a boundary that has separated black and white, Jews and Irish, Dominican-born and American-born—and make common cause in pursuit of one of the most precious rights: the right to make a home and build a better life in New York City.

Download or read book The Aesthetics of Necropolitics written by Natasha Lushetich and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collection comprises contributions from leading artist-theorists in the fields of necropolitics and tactical media, and from increasingly influential scholars of biomediality and urban performativity

Download or read book Living History written by Ana Lucia Araujo and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focusses on the several forms of reconstructing the slave past in the present. The recent emergence of the memory of slavery allows those who are or who claim to be descendents of slaves to legitimize their demand for recognition and for reparations for past wrongs. Some reparation claims encompass financial compensation, but very often they express the need for memorialization through public commemoration, museums, and monuments. In some contexts, presentification of the slave past has helped governments and the descendants of former masters and slave merchants to formulate public apologies. For some, expressing repentance is not only a means to erase guilt but also a way to gain political prestige. The authors analyse different aspects of the recent phenomenon of memorializing slavery, especially the practices employed to stage the slave past in both public and private spaces. The essays present memory and oblivion as part of the same process; they discuss reconstructions of the past in the present at different public and private levels through historiography, photography, exhibitions, monuments, memorials, collective and individual discourses, cyberspace, religion and performance. By offering a comparative perspective on the United States and West Africa, as well as on Western Europe, South America, and the Caribbean, the chapters offer new possibilities to explore the resurgence of the memory of slavery as a transnational movement in our contemporary world.