Police And The Empire City

During the years between the Civil War and World War II, police in New York City struggled with how to control a diverse city. In Police and the Empire City Matthew Guariglia tells the history of the New York Police to show how its origins were built upon and inseparably entwined with the history of race, ethnicity, and whiteness in the United States. Guariglia explores the New York City Police Department through its periods of experimentation and violence as police experts import tactics from the US occupation of the Philippines and Cuba, devise modern bureaucratic techniques to better suppress Black communities, and infiltrate supposedly unknowable immigrant neighborhoods. Innovations ranging from recruiting Chinese, Italian, or German police to form “ethnic squads,” the use of deportation and federal immigration restrictions to control local crime—even the introduction of fingerprinting—were motivated by attempts to govern a multiracial city. Campaigns to remake the police department created an urban landscape where power, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, crime, and bodies collided and provided a foundation for the supposedly “colorblind,” technocratic, federally backed, and surveillance-based policing of today.

This major anthology brings together the best literary writing about New York--from O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Steinbeck to Paul Auster and James Baldwin.

Recognizing that an historic study of American racism and police violence should become part of today’s canon, Jelani Cobb contextualizes it for a new generation. The Kerner Commission Report, released a month before Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, is among a handful of government reports that reads like an illuminating history book—a dramatic, often shocking, exploration of systemic racism that transcends its time. Yet Columbia University professor and New Yorker correspondent Jelani Cobb argues that this prescient report, which examined more than a dozen urban uprisings between 1964 and 1967, has been woefully neglected. In an enlightening new introduction, Cobb reveals how these uprisings were used as political fodder by Republicans and demonstrates that this condensed edition of the Report should be essential reading at a moment when protest movements are challenging us to uproot racial injustice. A detailed examination of economic inequality, race, and policing, the Report has never been more relevant, and demonstrates to devastating effect that it is possible for us to be entirely cognizant of history and still tragically repeat it.

From the author of Youngblood comes a “brilliant and daring” (Phil Klay, award-winning author of Redeployment) novel following a group of super-powered soldiers and civilians as they navigate an imperial America on the precipice of a major upheaval—for fans of The Fortress of Solitude and The Plot Against America. Thirty years after its great triumph in Vietnam, the United States has again become mired in an endless foreign war overseas. Stories of super soldiers known as the Volunteers tuck in little American boys and girls every night. Yet domestic politics are aflame—an ex-military watchdog group clashes with police while radical terrorists threaten to expose government experiments within the veteran rehabilitation colonies. Halfway between war and peace, the Volunteers find themselves waiting for orders in the vast American city-state, Empire City. There they encounter a small group of civilians who know the truth about their powers, including Sebastian Rios, a young bureaucrat wrestling with survivor guilt, and Mia Tucker, a wounded army pilot-turned-Wall Street banker. Meanwhile, Jean-Jacques Saint-Preux, a Haitian American Volunteer from the International Legion, decides he’ll do whatever it takes to return to the front lines. Through it all, a controversial retired general emerges as a frontrunner in the presidential campaign, promising to save the country from itself. Her election would mean unprecedented military control over the country, with promises of security and stability—but at what cost? “A passionate, scary, wise, and perhaps even prophetic novel” (Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried), Empire City is a rousing vision of an alternate—yet all too familiar—America on the brink written by a “preeminent voice in American writing” (Sara Novic, author of Girl at War).

"Theodore Roosevelt is best remembered as America's prototypical "cowboy" president--an outdoorsy, rough-riding figure who was as versatile with a six-shooter as he was with a pen, and who derived his political wisdom from a life spent in rugged and inhospitable environs: the Dakota Badlands, the battlefields of Cuba, and the African savannah. Roosevelt himself did little to dispel his outdoorsy aura, and for decades historians have bought into this mythology. Yet while such experiences certainly contributed to Roosevelt's progressive politics and abiding love of the natural world, they've played an excessive role in defining his biography. In fact, Roosevelt was a native Manhattanite who came of age in the upper crust of New York society, and the reformist, anti-corruption policies for which he would come to be known were firmly rooted in the realities of life in the 19th-century city. A riveting portrait of a man and a city on the brink of greatness, Heir to the Empire City reveals that Roosevelt was a New Yorker through and through, and that his true education took place not on the ranges of the West but on the mean streets of New York"--

This groundbreaking history of how American police forces have been militarized is now revised and updated. Newly added material brings the story through 2020, including analysis of the Ferguson protests, the Obama and Trump administrations, and the George Floyd protests. The last days of colonialism taught America’s revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. But over the last two centuries, America’s cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as enemies. In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians’ ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. His fascinating, frightening narrative that spans from America’s earliest days through today shows how a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society.

There has always been a symbiotic relationship between New York City and the people who have settled there. This study traces the major developments on Manhattan Island, which began as a base for privateering, as it evolved into one of the world's great cities. At the same time, the author also describes the background, the adjustments that had to be made to the New World, and the contributions of the millions who chose to settle there. There are six chronological chapters, each discussing the groups who came in the years as covered by that chapter, the city as it was when they arrived, what they added to the city, and how life in New York enabled most to improve their lives. The Irish laborers who came in the middle of the 19th century, for example, contributed enormously to the building of a clean water system. The wages earned from this work allowed them to feed, house and clothe their families while enabling the city to avoid the frequent cholera epidemics that had devastated the city in earlier years.