Filter by:

Filter by published date

A mother and daughter attend a candlelight vigil
partner

The Deadly Bronx Fire Exposes the Perils and Politics of Heating One’s Home

For less fortunate New Yorkers, access to safe, adequate heating has never been assured.
Anti-War and Anti-Fascist Demonstration In New York

Cameras for Class Struggle

How the radical documentarians of the Workers' Film and Photo League put their art in the service of social movements.
partner

How Gentrification Caused America’s Cities to Burn

Yuppies attract cafes and amenities to gentrifying neighborhoods. They also spark rising rents — and even violence.

151 Years of America’s Housing History

From the first tenement regulation to work requirements for public-housing residents, these are key moments in housing policy.
Vegetable stand at the Mulberry St. bend, photograph by Jacob Riis.

Policing Unpolicable Space: The Mulberry Bend

Sanitation reformers confront a neighborhood seemingly immune to state intervention.
Girls in line to enter a bathhouse.

Public Baths Were Meant to Uplift the Poor

In Progressive-Era New York, a now-forgotten trend of public bathhouses was introduced in order to cleanse the unwashed masses.
Photographer Gordon Parks and Norman Fontanelli, whose family is the subject of Parks's photojournalism.
partner

Gordon Parks' Diary of a Harlem Family

Narrated photo journal of time spent with a family to discuss poverty and race.
Robert Moses sitting in front of a catelog of blueprints.

The Inadequacy of the Abundance Agenda

Three new books propose market solutions to problems that require government intervention. We’ve been here before. It didn’t end well.
Image by Hans Glaser depicting a blood rain that supposedly occurred near Dinkelsbühl in Germany’s Franconia region in 1554.

Strange Gods: Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned

Rains of blood and frogs, mysterious disappearances, objects in the sky: these were the anomalies that fascinated Charles Fort in his Book of the Damned.
Students in Winnetka, Ill., are checked by a nurses as shown here on return to school following illness. 1947.
partner

To Address the Teen Mental Health Crisis, Look to School Nurses

For more than a century, school nurses have improved public health in schools and beyond.
Lincoln Center on the opening night of the Met Opera, 1966.

Curtains for Lincoln Center

On the falsification of Lincoln Center’s history.
Girls reading "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."

Betty Smith Enchanted a Generation of Readers with ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’

No other 20th-century American novel did quite so much to burnish Brooklyn’s reputation.
This isn’t a controversial issue: New Yorkers want more public bathrooms.

Give Us Public Toilets

The fight for a dignified space to carry out the most basic of human functions was popular when 19th-century Progressives took it on. It's time to take up that fight again.
Zoe Anderson Norris.

Meet Zoe Anderson Norris, the "Nellie Bly You've Never Heard Of"

Norris, who dubbed herself the "Queen of Bohemia," exposed the injustices of post-Gilded Age New York City—by going undercover.
The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902 book cover with photo of Jewish immigrants in the street on the Lower East Side, NYC.

The Great Kosher Meat War Of 1902

Immigrant housewives and the riots that shook New York City.
Dancing at the spring festival at St. George in 1984.

'The World Was Ukrainian'

A stubborn and surprising immigrant enclave, hiding in plain sight on the Lower East Side.
Dancers in West Side Story jumping on stage

Why West Side Story Leaves Out African Americans

The new film is set in a now-bulldozed Black neighborhood, so why is it all about whites and Puerto Ricans? Because it really takes place in Los Angeles.
Unaccompanied children in a train station

Novel Transport

The anatomy of the “orphan train” genre.
Digitally colored map of New York based on census data

Mapping Historical New York

A digital atlas that visualizes Manhattan’s and Brooklyn’s transformations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
James Baldwin smoking at a table in the South of France in November 1979.

The Socialism of James Baldwin

By the end of his life, inspired by the radicalism of the Black Panthers, Baldwin was again ready to proclaim himself a socialist.

The Long Reinvention of the South Bronx

Peter L'Official on the Mythologies Behind Urban Renewal.
Unnamed Black girl.

An Unnamed Girl, a Speculative History

What a photograph reveals about the lives of young black women at the turn of the century.
Photograph of murder victim by Weegee.

The Lost World of Weegee

Depression-era Americans viewed urban life in America through the lens of Weegee’s camera.

Lonesome on the Lower East Side

The story of the Bintel Brief, an early twentieth-century advice column for Jewish immigrants.
Firefighters trying to put out the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911.

How Poor, Mostly Jewish Immigrants Organized 20,000 and Fought for Workers Rights

These women came ready to fight.

When the Idea of Home Was Key to American Identity

From log cabins to Gilded Age mansions, how you lived determined where you belonged.

How the Battle for Sunlight Shaped New York City

As the city reached for the sky, those down below had to scramble for daylight.

How The 'Pox' Epidemic Changed Vaccination Rules

During the 1898-1904 pox epidemic, public health officials and policemen forced thousands of Americans to be vaccinated against their will.
A subterranean shot of the Lexington Avenue station, which made a loop around City Hall, in the early 1900s.

October 27, 1904: The New York City Subway System Opens

“The bearing of this upon social conditions can hardly be overestimated.”

Filter Results:

Suggested Filters:

Idea