Muriel Rukeyser

2020 ◽  
pp. 181-183
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
York City ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Muriel Rukeyser ◽  
Poetry Collection

Born to a wealthy family in New York City, poet and essayist Muriel Rukeyser sought to make sense of the discrepancies she saw between the privileges of her youth, the loss of her family’s money in the Great Depression, and the difficulties faced by other families around her. Her prolific career began at the age of twenty-two when poet Stephen Vincent Benét chose her first poetry collection, ...

West, Nathanael (1903–1940)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Meehan
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
York City ◽  
Nathanael West ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Depression Era ◽  
Miss Lonelyhearts ◽  
Title Character

Nathanael West was an author and screenwriter whose work spanned the decade of the 1930s. He was born Nathan Weinstein on 17 October 1903 in New York City; his decision to change his name at the age of twenty-two reflects a life-long ambivalence toward his Jewish ancestry. He is best known as a novelist whose work teems with characters suffering from psychological traumas stemming from the bleak atmosphere of Depression-era America. He died tragically and in relative obscurity with his wife Eileen in an automobile accident outside of El Centro, California in 1940. Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), his second novel, is widely considered his best work. Unlike his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) — which was influenced by French surrealism and was highly experimental in style — Miss Lonelyhearts is rooted in the everyday challenges of the Great Depression. The title character, whose actual name is never given, works as an advice columnist for a newspaper in New York City. Although he and others see the job as trivial, the desperate letters from readers begin to take a heavy emotional toll, leading him on an ill-fated search for meaning. Although the book’s plot is tragic, it also features elements of black comedy, a pervasive element of West’s work.

Fear Itself

2019 ◽  
pp. 86-119
Author(s):  
John Marsh
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
York City ◽  
The Great Depression

The chapter begins with perhaps the most famous quotation to emerge from the Great Depression: Franklin Roosevelt’s assertion that the only thing Americans had to fear was fear itself, which sounds good in theory but may not have reflected reality. To test that reading, the chapter examines various sources of fear in the Great Depression: a serial murderer in Cleveland; the polio epidemic that broke out in New York City in the summer of 1931; and the nearly constant fear of unemployment that characterized life during the Great Depression and made its way into the fiction of the period, including Helen Hunt’s Hardy Perennial. The chapter argues that what these sources have in common is a concern for the purity and autonomy of being, the nature or essence of a person, and the dread that such being might be violated and despoiled by impersonal but malevolent forces.

Spending Our Capital

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ehrenfeld
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
York City ◽  
The Other ◽  
Earned Income ◽  
Annual Crops ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Hunting And Gathering ◽  
The Family ◽  
Almost All

A deeply felt aversion to spending accumulated capital is an ancient part of the heritage of most societies. Although my father was a doctor, not a businessman, he taught this to me. He had lived through the bankruptcy of his own parents during the Great Depression, watching as they gradually sacrificed the inventory of their store in Passaic to keep the family in food and clothing. On one side of this store, my grandfather sold records, phonographs, and sewing machines and repaired the appliances that he sold; on the other side, my grandmother, a brilliant dress de-signer, prepared bridal gowns for customers who came from as far away as New York City. She would dress the brides on the wedding day, too, and was celebrated for her ability to make the plainest bride look beautiful. But as the depression wore on, business fell off, the customers stopped coming from New York, and the stock of goods dwindled away. There was no choice but to close the store; my grandparents’ livelihood was gone forever. Later, my father and the oldest of his four brothers made it a priority to pay their parents’ creditors in full, a decision that entailed sacrifices in itself. The lesson was handed down to me: you can spend your earned income and any interest you may have received, providing you first set aside a portion to increase your savings; but never spend the principal, your capital, except as an act of final desperation. To most of us, capital is associated with business, yet the habit of pre-serving capital and handing it on to the next generation started, I am pretty sure, not as an economic or financial practice, but as an agricultural one. In Neolithic societies, it must have begun when farming replaced hunting and gathering as the main source of food. From Anatolia to North Africa to Peru, the staple grains of wheat, rice, corn, millet, oats, barley, and rye, the legumes such as peas and beans, and other vegetables from squashes to radishes, were almost all annual crops.

The Bank Panic of 1907: The Role of Trust Companies

1992 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 611-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Moen ◽  
Ellis W. Tallman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Financial Crises ◽  
Balance Sheet ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
National Bank ◽  
Bank Panic

The Bank Panic of 1907 was one of the most severe financial crises in the United States before the Great Depression. Although contemporaries realized that the panic in New York City was centered at trust companies, subsequent research has relied heavily on national bank data. Balance sheet data for trust companies and state banks as well as call reports of national banks indicate that the contraction of loans and deposits in New York City during the panic was confined to the trust companies.

Sex Researcher

2019 ◽  
pp. 37-64
Author(s):  
Susan G. Davis
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
New York ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
York City ◽  
Book Design ◽  
Henry Miller ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Literary Publishing ◽  
Productive Research ◽  
Police Raid

In the years 1934-40, Gershon Legman defined his life’s work and taught himself the skills he would use in his richly productive research career. Moving to New York City after graduating high school, at the height of the Great Depression, he tried to make a career for himself as a writer about sex. Legman was taken on as a sex researcher and bibliographer for the eminent gynecologist Robert L. Dickinson. He also worked as a book scout and courier in underground erotica publishing, shuttling merchandise around for the book dealer Frances Stellof. He learned printing, layout, binding, and book design in the workshop of Jacob Brussel. His first publication as a folklorist, a glossary of homosexual slang, was researched with Thomas Painter for the Committee on Sex Variants, under Dr. Dickinson’s auspices. Also, during these years, Legman aimed to shatter the censorship barriers in literary publishing. He worked as a dollar-a-page pornographer, impersonating Henry Miller, among others. With Brussel, he brought out the first American edition of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and under a pseudonym published his own first book, Oragenitalism, a treatise on oral sex. Both volumes were highly illegal, and when they were seized in a police raid, Legman barely escaped arrest.

scholarly journals Fetters of Debt, Deposit, or Gold during the Great Depression? The International Propagation of the Banking Crisis of 1931

2011 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Richardson ◽  
Patrick Van Horn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Interest Rates ◽  
York City ◽  
Gold Standard ◽  
Financial Crises ◽  
Banking Crisis ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Two Sides

AbstractA banking crisis began in Austria in May 1931 and intensified in July, when runs struck banks throughout Germany. In September, the crisis compelled Britain to quit the gold standard. Newly discovered data shows that failure rates rose for banks in New York City, at the center of the United States money market, in July and August 1931, before Britain abandoned the gold standard and before financial outflows compelled the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. Banks in New York City had large exposures to foreign deposits and German debt. This paper tests to see whether the foreign exposure of money center banks linked the financial crises on the two sides of the Atlantic.

An Important Armenian MS. with Greek Miniatures

1942 ◽  
Vol 74 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 155-162
Author(s):  
H. Kurdian
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Christian Iconography

In 1941 while in New York City I was fortunate enough to purchase an Armenian MS. which I believe will be of interest to students of Eastern Christian iconography.

Hospitals: N.Y. Appellate Court Denies Move to Privatize Public Hospital

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-203
Author(s):  
Robert Chatham
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Public Health System ◽  
Municipal Hospital ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Benefit ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Benefit Corporation ◽  
The City

The Court of Appeals of New York held, in Council of the City of New York u. Giuliani, slip op. 02634, 1999 WL 179257 (N.Y. Mar. 30, 1999), that New York City may not privatize a public city hospital without state statutory authorization. The court found invalid a sublease of a municipal hospital operated by a public benefit corporation to a private, for-profit entity. The court reasoned that the controlling statute prescribed the operation of a municipal hospital as a government function that must be fulfilled by the public benefit corporation as long as it exists, and nothing short of legislative action could put an end to the corporation's existence.In 1969, the New York State legislature enacted the Health and Hospitals Corporation Act (HHCA), establishing the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) as an attempt to improve the New York City public health system. Thirty years later, on a renewed perception that the public health system was once again lacking, the city administration approved a sublease of Coney Island Hospital from HHC to PHS New York, Inc. (PHS), a private, for-profit entity.

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