Revolting New York: How 400 Years of Riot, Rebellion, Uprising, and Revolution Shaped a City
2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 105; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jaz024
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoRevolting New York is an important and timely edited collection exploring the role of violent unrest in the history of New York City. The contributors do a fine job of tracing nearly fifty riots, both famous events such as the New York City draft riots of 1863 and much smaller events such as the doctors' riot of 1788. In the process, as the coeditor Don Mitchell points out in the introduction, they present a way to think about New York City's historical geography, about how struggle has created urban spaces, and about how those spaces have, in turn, shaped the behavior of city residents. The extensively illustrated individual essays, each covering one specific moment of urban upheaval, are, by and large, quite good, even when they cover well-worn ground. Peter Waldman's brief discussion of the riots against the Gary Plan (an educational system instituted in Gary, Indiana, in 1907) is an excellent example of this; if Waldman does little new research, he neatly uses the struggle over who would control the city's school—progressive reformers or Tammany Hall—as a lovely encapsulation of the struggles that marked the Progressive Era on a national scale. Other chapters accomplish even more; the chapters by Neil Smith on the 1980s fight over Tompkins Square Park and that by Manissa M. Maharawal and Zoltán Glück on the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests provide fine accounts of events so recent that they are rarely covered in other texts on New York City's history. Not surprisingly, given the emphasis on geography, the book also contains several fascinating maps of the city's many moments of upheaval.
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