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JIM MACKIN AT THE BLOOMINGDALE NEIGHBORHOOD HISTORY GROUP
Notable New Yorkers of Manhattan's Upper West Side: Bloomingdale-Morningside Heights
Nearly 600 captivating stories of notable former residents of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, some famous, some forgotten
"Jim Mackin’s work will add an extra dimension to your enjoyment of this marvelous neighborhood. What fascinating people lived, wrought, wrote, schemed and sang behind those windows we pass every day!"—Gilbert Tauber, nycstreets.info
New Books Network on The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot
In northern Manhattan in 1841, the naturalist John James Audubon bought 14 acres of farmland on the banks of the Hudson River and built his family a home far from the crowded downtown streets. Audubon’s country homestead is long gone, but his story launches Matthew Spady’s The Neighborhood Manhattan Forgot: Audubon Park and the Families Who Shaped It (Fordham UP, 2020). The book traces the complex path by which woodlands became a multi-ethnic big-city neighborhood. Framing his narrative in the lives of two families—the Audubons and the Grinnells—Spady tells how family dysfunctions, economic crises, and technological change created a Manhattan neighborhood that no one could have predicted at its birth.
This interview was produced with the collaboration of the Gotham Center for New York City History.
Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University, is the author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York and co-author of All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York. He can be reached at [email protected].
AWARD WINNING TITLES & AUTHORS
2021 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences
The AAIS Book Prize Committee found Hijras, Lovers, Brothers compelling, ethnographically rich, theoretically insightful, and elegantly written. Saria's descriptions and arguments about the “fullness” of their lives, particularly the rhythm and flow of the “small pleasures of [their] everyday lives,” add up to a stunningly fresh and intimate perspective on this marginalized and stigmatized group. They also show how this community of hijras maintains significant mutually supportive kinship connections with their natal families. Saria's fieldwork—conducted over a ten-year period between 2008 and 2018—is also impressive, as is the deep engagement with key debates in cultural anthropology, queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, and South Asian studies.
In Thinking Through Crisis, James Edward Ford III examines the works of Richard Wright, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes during the 1930s in order to articulate a materialist theory of trauma. Ford highlights the dark proletariat’s emergence from the multitude apposite to white supremacist agendas. In these works, Ford argues, proletarian, modernist, and surrealist aesthetics transform fugitive slaves, sharecroppers, leased convicts, levee workers, and activist intellectuals into protagonists of anti-racist and anti-capitalist movements in the United States.
The novel, the literary adage has it, reflects a world abandoned by God. Yet the possibilities of novelistic form and literary exegesis exceed the secularizing tendencies of contemporary literary criticism. Showing how the Qurʾan itself invites and enacts critical reading, Hoda El Shakry’s Qurʾanic model of narratology enriches our understanding of literary sensibilities and practices in the Maghreb across Arabophone and Francophone traditions.
The Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize recognizes the outstanding achievement of an individual who has dedicated a lifetime of work to the mission and values of American studies.
Avery F. Gordon was a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara for thirty years and is currently a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck School of Law University of London. She is the author of The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (Fordham).
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