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Offers a panoramic view of New York City in the 1920s, uncovering hidden histories from within entertainment, politics, arts, technology, and the law.
Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York offers a fresh look at 1920s New York City, unearthing stories of everyday life and marginalized communities. In sections that intertwine entertainment, politics, art, technology, crime, shopping, eating, and recreation, the book portrays sweeping events such as the Harlem Renaissance, Prohibition, and immigration reform through anecdotes of individual experiences that counter the era's popular conceptions of ballooning wealth and uproarious celebration. Jonathan Ezra Goldman's whirlwind tour of early 1920s New York City visits an all-female police platoon, a Black amusement park shut down before it opened, an Arabic literary salon, socialist Puerto Rican cigar factories, Chinatown funerals, lesbian cafes, overcrowded jails, toxic dumps, and Ku Klux Klan recruitment offices. The grand narratives of the 1920s interweave with little-known anecdotes about well-known figures such as Marcus Garvey, Dorothy Parker, and Babe Ruth, serving as a backdrop to the everyday challenges and triumphs of a city beset by crowds, automobile traffic, and rapidly changing technology and urban infrastructure, as well as erased stories of injustices like Jim Crow practices, immigration anxieties, and the violent treatment of political dissent. These stories still resonate today, showing that this dizzying, exuberant ride through hidden history can help twenty-first readers see our own moment more clearly.
"Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York is that rare work of history that is both eminently scholarly—a nearly encyclopedic look at 1920s New York—and enchantingly readable. Goldman brings to vivid life figures, moments, and movements that have for too long been ignored. The book looks backward to look forward; that is, it helps us to understand how we got to where we are now. In particular, Jonathan Goldman explores the lives of figures who have, because of their race, gender, sexuality, or immigration status, been sidelined in our history books as much (or more) than they were in their own time. A fantastic work of engaged scholarship." — Hugh Ryan, author of When Brooklyn Was Queer
"In Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York, Jonathan Ezra Goldman takes readers on a wild ride through New York City during the 1920s Jazz Age. Goldman challenges the reliance upon a familiar, singular narrative of this period (or any period, for that matter). Viewing daily life through multiple lenses across lines of class, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity provides readers with the opportunity to understand better the range of human experiences and the complexity of urban politics and society." — Shirley J. Yee, author of An Immigrant Neighborhood: Interethnic and Interracial Encounters in New York before 1930