"A falling off can indicate decline or diminishment, often gradual—the petering out of a business, for instance, or the decay of a once marvellous building. Or it can refer to something abrupt, absolute. . . Both senses haunt Barbara Mensch’s photographic history of lower Manhattan, in particular the Fulton Fish Market, which, for a time, was an island unto itself."
—The New Yorker
"There is Barbara Mensch, whose images are like the conjuring rain. She is the Brooklyn Bridge of the New York imagination, linking the now and the then. She sees the incremental turns in the city’s inexorable evolution."
—Dan Barry, The New York Times
"Visually evocative and spare on text . . . It’s ideal for anyone nostalgic for old New York."
—Publishers Weekly
Winner, The David R. Coffin Publication Grant
"From shops, street markets, and festivals to single family homes and high-rise apartments, the many dozens of photographs in Global Queens give a wonderful sense of how Asian, Caribbean, and Latin American immigration has transformed the landscape of what is now the most diverse county in the nation."
—Nancy Foner, author of One Quarter of the Nation: Immigration and the Transformation of America
"With kaleidoscopic views into the raw and eclectic urban landscapes of Queens, Global Queens takes us on a journey through the making of the most ethnically diverse place in the nation. As an immigrant and a former resident of the borough, the visual journey makes me realize that each of us, past and present, has played a part in its becoming, including its unique sense of multiplicity and belonging."
—Jeff Hou, University of Washington, Seattle
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"In New York City half a dozen years before Stonewall, gay men knew who they loved but not yet who they were. Cahill brings their world to life in a big-hearted novel of existential suspense. A closeted banker fences with a blackmailer, an English professor searches for a brutalized lover, and a grocery store manager loses his job and his family, and the reader turns the pages faster and faster to find out not just whether these men make it but also how gays became people of integrity at a time when shame was so deeply nested in laws, institutions, and their own psyches. Cahill paints on a grand canvas the internal, individual revolutions that came before the historic one."
—Caleb Crain, author of Overthrow and Necessary Errors
Honorable Mention, 2023 Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize, Human Sexuality & Anthropology Interest Group
This engrossing ethnography of one of South Asia’s third gendered or trans populations reveals not a group of marginalized others but a way of life composed of laughter, struggles, and desires. The book shows how hijras trouble how we read queerness, kinship, and the psyche.
Through a critique of Left realism, culturalism, and pessimism from the standpoint of heterodox Marxism and Black radicalism, Gary Wilder insists that we place questions of solidarity and temporality at the center of Left political thinking. He makes a bold case for embracing a concrete utopian politics of the possible-impossible adequate to current planetary crises.
Winner, The Victorian Society New York Book Award
As Superintendent of School Buildings from 1891 to 1922, architect Charles B. J. Snyder elevated the standards of school architecture. Unprecedented immigration and Progressive Era changes in educational philosophy led to his fresh approach to design and architecture, which forever altered the look and feel of twentieth-century classrooms and school buildings. Students rich or poor, immigrant or native New Yorker, went from learning in factory-like schools to attending classes in schools with architectural designs and enhancements that to many made them seem like palaces.
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