Teaching

Hist 285

The History of New York City

New York City is a city of superlatives. It is the city of seemingly limitless possibility and potential, a theme applied to culture, innovation, opportunity, development, immigration, and public life. New York sets a global example for urban culture, business, and politics, but at the same time is exemplary and unique. This class will explore the history of these superlatives and contradictions. To begin, we will consider the 1600s establishment of New York as New Amsterdam, Dutch and Native American relations, and the creation of the city into the early 1800s.  The second section explores the city’s nineteenth century growth, culminating in 1898 with the consolidation of the five borough city. How did this transformation occur? What was it like to live in this growing city? To govern it? The third section charts the modernization of the urban city through reform movements, infrastructure, and social change.  The final section considers New York during the urban crisis and the redevelopment of urban infrastructure, civil life, and culture at the turn of the 21st century.  To understand the future of the city requires a consideration of the debates surrounding urban “blight” and urban renewal, the racialization of poverty, and gentrification. The ideas of culture and urban life, diversity and inequality, politics, and urban design will unite these sections.

Hist 348

The History of Queens: A History of New York from the Outer Boroughs

New York City is more than Manhattan Island. Since 1898, Greater New York has been made up of five boroughs: New York on Manhattan, the Bronx on the mainland, Brooklyn and Queens on Long Island, and Staten Island.  This course takes on the task of exploring beyond Manhattan to consider the spaces of the periphery and the people there who contributed to the shaping of the regional city. The multi-layered history of the outer boroughs is a microcosm of America, an opportunity to study the linkages between race, ethnicity, class, and industrial growth in the city’s historical growth and its contemporary identity. Queens is sometimes referred to as “the forgotten borough.”  Challenging this frame, in this class students will create original scholarly research on the history of Queens. To explore this tension between the city center and outer boroughs, topics for this course will include colonial agricultural communities, suburbanization of the outer boroughs, the expansion of urban infrastructure (parks, bridges, highways, and water systems) as a process of modernization and urban imperialism, urban planning and suburban designs, the role of leisure in the development of the urban fringe, diversity, race, and immigrant identity in local community life.

Hist 392w

• Also taught as Hist 786: The American Urban Environment, 1830–1930

Nature and the City: U.S. Urban Environmental History

Americans often think of cities as places without nature, and nature is often defined as the antithesis of urban spaces. This course challenges this assumption, drawing on scholarship from the growing field of urban environmental history to uncover the interconnections between urban America and the natural world. We will explore the process of urbanization, one of the fundamental themes of American history, to examine how nature and cities have shaped one another. Readings and discussion topics will survey urban spaces in the nation across space and time, include the role nature played in the situating of cities across North America; colonial and nineteenth-century cultural reactions to urbanization; the social and economic relationships between cities and their hinterlands; the debates around public parks, pollution, and public health; and gentrification and the urban environmental justice movement. The goal of this course is to investigate how American society has drawn upon nature to build and sustain urban growth, and, in the process, transformed the natural world and ideas about it.  

Hist 343

• Also taught as Hist 777.1: The City in American History since 1890

History of the American City

This course provides a comprehensive overview of the development of the American city and its impact on society, culture, ethnicity, race and gender relations, economics, and politics. We will examine the geography of cities, the social and cultural patterns of urban life, and the impact of class, race, gender, and ethnicity on the urban experience. The course will ask the following questions: What makes urban life unique? What is the role of the city in American culture? Should a city be defined by its geography, its population, or its cultural institutions? How are public and private spaces defined in an urban environment?  What makes a successful city? What does it mean to say a city has failed? To address such questions and themes course topics will include, but are not limited to: infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, subways, parks, streets, sewers); migration and immigration; urban design; health in the city; preservation and development; planning and replanning; ideas of urban decline; tourism and leisure; and the use of public space.

Hist 392w

Twentieth Century New York City History

This class explores 20th century New York City through the lens of social history, focusing on social structures and the interaction of different groups of New Yorkers rather than affairs of state, environment, or planning. While all of these topics are key to understanding New York City, this semester we will consider the century’s trends from the perspective of regular people living, working, playing, and fighting in the city’s boroughs. Through original research and a focus on primary sources, we will add new stories of New Yorkers to the city’s history.

Honors 126w

The People of New York City

This interdisciplinary seminar examines the dynamics of community and protest in New York City as a way to explore the “people of New York.” We will use the theme of “uprisings” to investigate the evolving meaning of “justice” and “community” in past and present New York City. In this seminar, students investigate the city through an interdisciplinary study of social history and contemporary social action in shaping New York City’s identity.  Seminar topics include: the factors that have driven people together—or apart—to different types of social action and activism; the different ways that religion, economics, gender, and ethnicity have shaped protests and justice demands; and the formation and social organization of communities.  We will focus on past and present protest movements, with an emphasis on producing original analysis and creative representations of contemporary examples. What does justice mean to New Yorkers? How has its meaning evolved over time? How have the people of New York organized and advocated for it? When and how does backlash to such movements emerge? What role does community celebration and joy play in this history? We will consider a wide variety of protest movements, including political organizing, riots, economic strikes, marches and parades, and the occupation of space.

Hist 784

Sources of New York City History

This course is an intensive examination of the chief archival resources basic for the study of the history of New York City. The course strives to offer students analytical tools with which to approach New York City history as a researcher.  One goal is to develop research, analysis, and writing skills. The second is to get to know the types of materials available in, and the range of archival repositories of, New York. Students will have the opportunity to craft original research and share it with classmates.