Read an excerpt from Wall Street Last month Strike Debt, an offshoot group of Occupy Wall Street, began buying strangers’ debt in order to make it disappear. Another manifestation called Occupy Sandy swooped in during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy to assist gathering and delivering supplies, filming a documentary in the
Follow @yaleARTbooks In the introduction to Circus and the City: New York, 1793-2010, the catalogue accompanying a fabulous exhibition of the same name currently on view at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan, curator Matthew Wittmann recalls his own experience watching the hulking elephants of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and
After exploring her creative urges through journalism, sculpture, poetry, and theater, Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) found a home for her artistic talents in photography while working in Paris as a darkroom assistant to Man Ray. Abbott knew Ray from an earlier encounter in New York, and though at the beginning of
Where do we draw the line between our own personal history – history with a small “h” – and the History we consider public knowledge – history with a big “H”? This is an important question for historical researchers of any caliber. It shapes the way we value (and the
When Carla L. Peterson proposed a trip to the archives of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the hope of finding a record of her ancestors, her historian friends were skeptical. In fact, it was only by a lucky chance that Peterson discovered a scrapbook page onto
The new film The Help, based on Kathryn Stockett’s novel of the same name, has been a box office success but has also been met with some thought-provoking criticism. A review in RD Magazine claims that the plot suggests black women need white women to give them a voice, while
Although this month’s Global and International Studies theme suggests a look at places far afield from home, in the US, where people come every day in search of a new life, international studies can be found even in the interactions of neighbors or a walk through a town or city. Claudia Gryvatz Copquin’s The Neighborhoods of Queens is an in-depth look at Queens, covering every neighborhood throughout the borough.
Michelle Stein One of the great parts of life in New York City is walking past buildings that offer a timeline of architectural history. Looking back to the more recent past, mid-century modernism took hold of New York City, leaving a strong mark on the city with both a new
An op-ed piece was posted to the New York Times’s “Opinionator” by Carla L. Peterson, whose book, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City, will be published next month. As part of the Times’s Disunion series, following the Civil War as it unfolded as