Amazon.com
There are a million stories in the wicked city, and New York: An Illustrated History contains hundreds of them. From its 17th-century beginnings as a small Dutch colony on the far edge of an empire to its late-20th-century status as one of the world's greatest cities, New York has been home to millions of fascinating people. Take, for example, Edward Hyde, royal governor of New York from 1702 to 1708. Hyde, cousin of Queen Anne, was heartily disliked by the colonists--in part because he was reputed to dress in women's clothing ("I represent a woman, and ought in all respects to resemble her as faithfully as I can," Hyde was reported to have said). Or Al Smith, son of immigrants, a day laborer, who worked his way up the political ladder and eventually became Governor of New York. Or Rosie Safran, a seamstress who survived the horrible fire that claimed 146 of her coworkers at the Triangle shirtwaist factory.
PBS darling Ric Burns (brother of Ken) teamed up with James Sanders and Lisa Ades to produce this spectacular volume and the accompanying 12-hour series. Some 500 illustrations enhance the narrative, while essays by and interviews with prominent New Yorkers-- Robert A. Caro, Carol Berkin, and David Levering Lewis among them--highlight their visions of the metropolis, past and present. New Yorkers or not, readers will enjoy stories of how the city grew and changed over time--such as in 1699, when the old Dutch city wall was torn down and a later-to-be-famous street laid out in its place; or in a 10-day period in 1930, when 14 new floors of the Empire State Building were erected. Along the way, the authors debunk a few myths: the Dutch didn't really pay only $24 for Manhattan, and no immigrant's name was known to have been changed by the Ellis Island inspectors--though the ships' manifests they were consulting may have been incorrect.
Burns and company are clearly enamored of New York, seeing it as "the ultimate city of dreaming and desire, a place of passage and transformation, of possibility and exchange, of mingled cultures and identities." They also see New York, with all its ups, downs, problems, and triumphs, as a microcosm of the modern world. Lavish, thorough, and pleasantly warm, New York: An Illustrated History reminds us that, yes, it's a wonderful town. --Sunny Delaney
From Publishers Weekly
A companion to an upcoming PBS series, this lavishly illustrated history is an engaging and intelligent work in its own right, presenting a coherent overview without ever glossing over thorny historical or political questions. By supplementing their well-researched text with photographs, paintings, newspaper headlines and interviews with historians and social critics, Burns (The Civil War, with Ken Burns) and Sanders have produced a volume that is as attractive as it is perceptive. Arranged chronologically, the book manages to capture some of the diverse elementsAsuch as the immigrant communities, labor unrest, traditional and avant-garde cultures, crime and architecture, among other factorsAthat continue to play important roles in the city's evolution. For example, the section on Greenwich Village, "The Republic of Washington Square," contains a succinct history of the area as a cultural engine, with rare photographs and illuminating quotes from Edmund Wilson and Floyd Dell. The section on the Harlem Renaissance provides a comprehensive analysis of the movement's development and importance, aptly illustrated and contextualized with an interview with David Levering Lewis. Burns and Sanders have successfully marshaled a huge amount of material into a format that is informative and highly entertaining. BOMC History Book Club selection. (Nov.) Cahners Business Information.Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This splendid history of America's premier city was written by Burns, director of such television documentaries as Coney Island and The Donner Party, and architect/writer Sanders. They were ably assisted by Ades, the picture editor, who assembled the 500 archival maps, paintings, prints, and contemporary photographs--all of which are visual delights that greatly enhance the text. Additional text is contributed by nine historians, urbanists, and literary figures. The companion volume to this fall's 12-hour PBS television series on the city, the book presents New York's sprawling history from the first sightings of the New York harbor by European explorers, through its founding as a Dutch colony in 1609, the beginning of English rule in 1664, the effects of the American Revolution, and on into the 19th and 20th centuries, which witnessed the city's emergence as the nation's leading seaport and its commercial, financial, and cultural capital. Both feared and widely emulated for its wealth and power, the city is a prodigy late 20th-century civilization. Burns's book helps explain how it got that way. Highly recommended.---Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., New York Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The latest PBS documentary epic, which premieres in November, wraps its 12-hour-long arms around Gotham, recently the subject of a well-received scholarly history (Gotham, by Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, 1998). Gotham may have been the burg's first nickname, conferred on it by Washington Irving in the 1820s when the city, by then commercially out-legging rival East Coast ports, began to take interest in its history. In Burns' hands, that history is cause for celebration of the de facto world capital the city has become. Several themes naturally structure his narrative: the city's capitalistic spirit, dating from the Dutch colonists; countercurrents of social movements; the city's immigrant and ethnic tapestry; its cultural fluorescences; and its constructed environment of buildings, bridges, and tunnels. Of these, the constructions are the most visible characters in Burns' drama, as they have been to any visitor or resident since Peter Stuyvesant commanded a defensive wall be built. Hundreds of images, many iconic, for example, the ironworkers on the Empire State Building, represent the continual building site Manhattan is, and such builders as DeWitt Clinton, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Robert Moses consequently rival in historical prominence the collection of crooks and reformers who have been the city's politicians. An impressively assembled album that handsomely shows off the city's magnificence. Gilbert Taylor
From Kirkus Reviews
A lavishly illustrated volume that makes a significant contribution to the current renaissance in written and graphic histories of New York City. Within the past four years, two major works about the nation's greatest cityThe Encyclopedia of New York City, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson, and Edwin G. Burrows's and Mike Wallace's Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898have appeared to critical acclaim. No doubt as a result, TV writer/producer Ric Burns and his associates saw the opportunity for a television series on the subject. Their work here coincides with, and is meant to complement, that upcoming production. While typical of the TV tie-in genre, this entry is among the very best of its kind. A solid history in its own right, it takes us from the arrival of the first Europeans to the present and offers a highly readable tale of the city's growth and the lives of its inhabitants. Except for the native tribes, who are unaccountably ignored, everyone and every thing New Yorkbuildings, transportation, port, commerce, and money chief among themplays a role. But what makes this tome worth its hefty price is its illustrations, aptly chosen to reveal the city's complex history in images. The result is a vibrant, jittery, opulently designed, very New York volume, reflective at once of its ostensible metropolitan subject, the television medium that spawned it, and our frazzled, segmented, postmodern culture. Only a few brief articles by, and interviews with, urban scholars seem out of place. While the complete history of Gotham will probably never be written, its impossible to imagine a more pleasing, up-to-date, one-volume tale of the city for contemporary readers (and viewers). (500 color and b&w illus., not seen) (History Book Club selection; First printing of 100,000) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
“This book combines striking illustrations with scintillating essays to produce
a superb history of the world’s first city.”
—Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
“A ravishing book . . . It can easily fill a winter of reading and browsing.”
—New York Times
Review
?This book combines striking illustrations with scintillating essays to produce
a superb history of the world?s first city.?
?Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
?A ravishing book . . . It can easily fill a winter of reading and browsing.?
?New York Times
Book Description
The companion volume to the PBS television series, with more than 500 full-color and black-and-white illustrations
This lavish and handsomely produced book captures all the beauty, complexity, and power of New York -- the city that seems the very embodiment of ambition, aspiration, romance, desire; the city that has epitomized the entire parade of modern life, with all its possibilities and problems. Chronicling the story of New York from its establishment as a Dutch trading post in 1624 to its global preeminence today, the book is at once the biography of a great city and a vivid exploration of the myriad forces -- commercial, cultural, demographic -- that converged in New York to usher in the contemporary world.
Weaving the strands of the city's sweeping history into a single compelling narrative, New York carries us through nearly four centuries of turbulent growth and change -- from the first settlement on the tip of "Manna-hata" Island to the destruction wrought by the Revolutionary War; to the city's stunning emergence in the nineteenth century as the nation's premier industrial metropolis; to the waves of early-twentieth-century immigration that forever transformed the city and the nation; to New York's transfiguration as the world's first modern city -- pioneering skyscrapers, apartment houses, subways, and highways -- and its role as the birthplace of so much of American popular culture. Along the way, we witness the building of the city's celebrated landmarks and neighborhoods, from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building and the United Nations; from Wall Street and Times Square to the Lower East Side, Harlem, and SoHo.
The book brims with vibrant illustrations, including hundreds of rare photographs, paintings, lithographs, prints, and period maps. The narrative incorporates the voices and stories of men and women -- statesmen, entrepreneurs, artists, and visionaries -- who have lived in and built the city: an extraordinary cast of characters that includes Peter Stuyvesant, Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, Walt Whitman, Boss Tweed, Jacob Riis, Emma Lazarus, J. P. Morgan, Al Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Gershwin, Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Moses, and Jane Jacobs.
Accompanying the book's narrative are interviews with Robert A. Caro, David Levering Lewis, and Robert A. M. Stern, and essays by a group of distinguished New York historians and critics -- Kenneth T. Jackson, Mike Wallace, Marshall Berman, Phillip Lopate, Carol Berkin, and Daniel Czitrom -- who add their insights about the city to this splendid history.
From the Hardcover edition.
From the Inside Flap
The companion volume to the PBS television series, with more than 500 full-color and black-and-white illustrations
This lavish and handsomely produced book captures all the beauty, complexity, and power of New York -- the city that seems the very embodiment of ambition, aspiration, romance, desire; the city that has epitomized the entire parade of modern life, with all its possibilities and problems. Chronicling the story of New York from its establishment as a Dutch trading post in 1624 to its global preeminence today, the book is at once the biography of a great city and a vivid exploration of the myriad forces -- commercial, cultural, demographic -- that converged in New York to usher in the contemporary world.
Weaving the strands of the city's sweeping history into a single compelling narrative, New York carries us through nearly four centuries of turbulent growth and change -- from the first settlement on the tip of "Manna-hata" Island to the destruction wrought by the Revolutionary War; to the city's stunning emergence in the nineteenth century as the nation's premier industrial metropolis; to the waves of early-twentieth-century immigration that forever transformed the city and the nation; to New York's transfiguration as the world's first modern city -- pioneering skyscrapers, apartment houses, subways, and highways -- and its role as the birthplace of so much of American popular culture. Along the way, we witness the building of the city's celebrated landmarks and neighborhoods, from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building and the United Nations; from Wall Street and Times Square to the Lower East Side, Harlem, and SoHo.
The book brims with vibrant illustrations, including hundreds of rare photographs, paintings, lithographs, prints, and period maps. The narrative incorporates the voices and stories of men and women -- statesmen, entrepreneurs, artists, and visionaries -- who have lived in and built the city: an extraordinary cast of characters that includes Peter Stuyvesant, Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, Walt Whitman, Boss Tweed, Jacob Riis, Emma Lazarus, J. P. Morgan, Al Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Gershwin, Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Moses, and Jane Jacobs.
Accompanying the book's narrative are interviews with Robert A. Caro, David Levering Lewis, and Robert A. M. Stern, and essays by a group of distinguished New York historians and critics -- Kenneth T. Jackson, Mike Wallace, Marshall Berman, Phillip Lopate, Carol Berkin, and Daniel Czitrom -- who add their insights about the city to this splendid history.
From the Hardcover edition.
From the Back Cover
“This book combines striking illustrations with scintillating essays to produce
a superb history of the world’s first city.”
—Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
“A ravishing book . . . It can easily fill a winter of reading and browsing.”
—New York Times
About the Author
Ric Burns is best known for his work on the acclaimed PBS series The Civil War, which he produced with Ken Burns and wrote with Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward, and for which he received two Emmy Awards and the Producer of the Year award of the Producers Guild of America. For public television, he has also directed the award-winning documentaries Coney Island, The Donner Party, and The Way West.
James Sanders, an architect, has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, and Architectural Record. He has completed design and development projects for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Parks Council, the Landmarks Preservation Commission, and other civic groups and commercial clients in New York and Los Angeles.
Lisa Ades most recently produced The Way West, a six-hour documentary for national broadcast on PBS. In 1992, she received Peabody and D. W. Griffith awards for producing The Donner Party. Before co-producing Coney Island with Ric Burns in 1990, she was a producer at New York's public television station WNET on the nightly public affairs series The Eleventh Hour.
From the Hardcover edition.
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