Radical Walking Tours Of New York City

Traditional walking tours of New York enshrine the wealthy and war heroes by emphasizing what they’ve left behind. Rarely seen are those buried in their wake—those who fought the power, pushing for a better world. In Radical Walking Tours of New York Bruce Kayton leads us to monuments of those other heroes. Through Kayton’s lens, the history of all hitherto existing neighborhoods is the history of class struggles, civil rights battles, and labor movements; these twelve tours provide as many exciting, provocative, and educational afternoons. You can visit, for instance, Emma Goldman’s long-time home in the East Village, Langston Hughes’s house in Harlem, the site of Mabel Dodge’s salon o the apartment in which John Reed worked on Ten Days That Shook the World, and the site of Margaret Sanger’s first birth control clinic. From Battery Park to Harlem, from the Lower East Side to Central Park, Bruce Kayton’s tours provide a new perspective on the history of both New York City and American radicalism.

Too often, tours of New York City are paeans to power--extolling the fabled New York skyline and the robber barrons whose wealth built it up, praising the marvels of a city built largely on finance. But New York has also, since its founding, been a city of struggle, a place where workers lived, created wealth, and spun out the rich cultural tapestry that has put the small island of Manhattan at the very center of the world's imagination. It is a city of proletarian uprising, of abolitionist rebellion, of civil rights demonstrations, and radical futures. This is Bruce Kayton's New York, the town of Emma Goldman and Langston Hughes, of Margaret Sanger and John Reed, of demonstrations and shootouts, of community gardens and marches. Now in an expanded third edition with a new Upper West Side tour featuring the Berrigans, Maxim Gorky, Lucien Carr and others, and updated sites reflecting recent anti-war and police-brutality protests, Occupy Wall Street and Zuccotti Park, and more, these thirteen walking tours, taking us from Battery Park to Harlem, from the Lower East Side to Central Park, offer a vital new perspective on the history of New York City and its place in the traditions of American radicalism.

Written by New York natives, this guide zeros in on Manhattan, the city's crown jewel, and its world-class museums, restaurants, clubs, and hotels, and then goes on to the rich and diverse outer boroughs, digging up the less obvious charms. 34 maps. of color maps.

How is local history thought about? How should it be approached? Through brief, succinct notes and essay-length entries, the Encyclopedia of Local History presents ideas to consider, sources to use, historical fields and trends to explore. It also provides commentary on a number of subjects, including the everyday topics that most local historians encounter. A handy reference tool that no public historian's desk should be without!

New York City residents will find this slender guide a "must have, " with more than 50 pages of innovative color maps.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Jewish socialist movement played a vital role in protecting workers’ rights throughout Europe and the Americas. Yet few traces of this movement or its accomplishments have been preserved or memorialized in Jewish heritage sites. The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World investigates the politics of heritage tourism and collective memory. In an account that is part travelogue, part social history, and part family saga, acclaimed historian Daniel J. Walkowitz visits key Jewish museums and heritage sites from Berlin to Belgrade, from Krakow to Kiev, and from Warsaw to New York, to discover which stories of the Jewish experience are told and which are silenced. As he travels to thirteen different locations, participates in tours, displays, and public programs, and gleans insight from local historians, he juxtaposes the historical record with the stories presented in heritage tourism. What he finds raises provocative questions about the heritage tourism industry and its role in determining how we perceive Jewish history and identity. This book offers a unique perspective on the importance of collective memory and the dangers of collective forgetting.

A vibrant narrative history of three hallowed Manhattan blocks—the epicenter of American cool. St. Marks Place in New York City has spawned countless artistic and political movements. Here Frank O’Hara caroused, Emma Goldman plotted, and the Velvet Underground wailed. But every generation of miscreant denizens believes that their era, and no other, marked the street’s apex. This idiosyncratic work of reportage tells the many layered history of the street—from its beginnings as Colonial Dutch Director-General Peter Stuyvesant’s pear orchard to today’s hipster playground—organized around those pivotal moments when critics declared “St. Marks is dead.” In a narrative enriched by hundreds of interviews and dozens of rare images, St. Marks native Ada Calhoun profiles iconic characters from W. H. Auden to Abbie Hoffman, from Keith Haring to the Beastie Boys, among many others. She argues that St. Marks has variously been an elite address, an immigrants’ haven, a mafia warzone, a hippie paradise, and a backdrop to the film Kids—but it has always been a place that outsiders call home. This idiosyncratic work offers a bold new perspective on gentrification, urban nostalgia, and the evolution of a community.

Fifteen walking tours of Manhattan below 14th street that visit scores of locations, parks, streets, and buildings that have played a part in progressive and radical movement history from the American Revolution through the anti-Vietnam war movement.