George Whitefield Awakens New York City

Author(s):  
Joyce D. Goodfriend

This chapter examines English evangelist George Whitefield's message of the “new birth” and how it came to resonate among a variety of New Yorkers, including adherents of the orthodox Dutch Reformed and Anglican Churches. Whitefield's influence on New Yorkers is best measured by focusing on his career as it intersected with the city's evolving religious life. In a process similar to that experienced by Dutch Reformed and Scottish Presbyterian traditionalists, devotees of Whitefield's brand of Christianity overcame ingrained habits and embraced novel religious ideas. During his seven-week stretch of preaching from December 1763 to January 1764, Whitefield sparked a religious awakening that touched New Yorkers of all backgrounds. This chapter considers how Whitefield's moral authority, augmented by his charismatic preaching, emboldened the people of New York City dwellers to challenge doctrines and practices they deemed inauthentic and to reject the counsel of men of stature in their churches.

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (5) ◽  
pp. 831-848 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Goldfischer

This paper examines an anti-homeless visual campaign which appeared in New York City in the summer of 2015, in the midst of a resurgence of public concern over the visibility of homeless New Yorkers. The campaign, produced by a police union and titled “Peek-A-Boo, We See You Too” encouraged police officers and allies concerned with a perceived decline in “quality of life” to photograph homeless people on the street, tagging their locations and uploading the photographs to a website. Using the photographs, concurrent discourses, and evidence from surveys conducted by a homeless-led organization, I argue that this campaign represents more than simply an instance of revenge upon and against the homeless. Rather, I suggest that it represents a moment of what philosopher Kristie Dotson calls “epistemic backgrounding” a case in which the people visually displayed at the center of the pictures are “backgrounded” in the knowledge produced off of their images. Connecting this singular campaign with a broader conception of anti-homeless actions, I suggest that we might understand the relationship of visuality and homelessness as one which relies on revanchism for its political logic but produces the simultaneous absence and presence of homeless people through epistemic backgrounding.


2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422199964
Author(s):  
Glenn Dyer

Historians have conducted important research on the rise of law-and-order politics in New York City, where anxieties over women’s freedoms, political battles over police oversight, and crime impacts in poor communities contributed to its rise. The numerous walkouts, negotiations, and worker-management conflicts around high-crime areas in New York City suggest that the question of law and order was a salient workplace issue as well for the members of Communication Workers of America Local 1101. In their case, such concerns predate the rhetorical rise of law and order and help us better understand why such politics found fertile ground among working-class New Yorkers, white and black. Repeated incidences, largely in the city’s black ghettoes, prompted workers with a strong class consciousness and commitment to solidarity to transform the problems and experiences of individual workers into a shared question to be addressed via collective action.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-169
Author(s):  
Paul Kidder ◽  

Jane Jacobs’s classic 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, famously indicted a vision of urban development based on large scale projects, low population densities, and automobile-centered transportation infrastructure by showing that small plans, mixed uses, architectural preservation, and district autonomy contributed better to urban vitality and thus the appeal of cities. Implicit in her thinking is something that could be called “the urban good,” and recognizable within her vision of the good is the principle of subsidiarity—the idea that governance is best when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses—a principle found in Catholic papal encyclicals and related documents. Jacobs’s work illustrates and illuminates the principle of subsidiarity, not merely through her writings on cities, but also through her activism in New York City, which was influential in altering the direction of that city’s subsequent planning and development.


1931 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-682
Author(s):  
Thomas H. Reed

The year which has passed since the preparation of the last “Notes on Municipal Affairs” (June 1, 1930) has been even more eventful than the preceding period.Developments in Particular Cities. New York City. The belief which had been growing for many years that the Tammany tiger was, after all, a self-restrained, self-muzzled beast has suffered a rude shock in the exposures of flagrant corruption in the sale of judicial office, the handling of vice, the purchase of land for school purposes, and in many other directions. The district attorney's office has been exposed to the searchlight of investigator Seabury. Charges were preferred against Mayor Walker by John Haynes Holmes and Rabbi Wise in the name of a citizens' committee. Governor Roosevelt dismissed these charges with scant consideration. In the meantime, however, the legislature ordered a most searching investigation of the whole governmental situation in New York—an investigation which bids fair to rival, in extent and dramatic interest, that of the celebrated Lexow committee.Chicago. In Chicago, Mayor Thompson's political career has suffered, if not extinction, at least a total eclipse. Though victorious against a broken field in the Republican primary, he was defeated by Anton J. Cermak in the election of April 7 by a vote of 476,932 to 671,189. It is probable that the people of Chicago were more anti-Thompson than pro-Cermak, but the new mayor is a vigorous and striking figure. For one thing, he is boss in his own right of the Democratic organization in Cook county.


2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 915-931 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel Eisenberg

In the 1980s, visible homelessness became one of the most pressing problems in New York City. While most New Yorkers expressed sympathy for the homeless, many of them also resisted efforts to site shelters and service facilities in their neighborhoods. But far from being simply a case of NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) sentiment, protests over the placement of these facilities arose in the context of decades-long neighborhood movements against urban disinvestment and the beginning of gentrification in some New York City neighborhoods. I argue that understanding this history is crucial to parsing the complex politics of anti-homeless facility protests in the 1980s and to understanding the rise of “quality of life” policies that would govern many neoliberal urban spaces by the 1990s.


1969 ◽  
Vol 12 (03) ◽  
pp. 293-303
Author(s):  
Dorothy Porter

On the evening of March 20, 1828, a group of free men of color organized a society that had as its purpose “the mental improvement of the people of color in the neighborhood of Philadelphia.” This organization was to be known as the “Reading Room Society.” Immediately a library was established and the librarian instructed to lend books to members for no longer than a week. Books were to be withdrawn or returned at the society's weekly meeting. Freedoms Journal, the earliest Negro newspaper, the first issue of which appeared in March, 1827, and Lundy's Genius of Universal Emancipation, an antislavery publication, were among the first works circulated. In May, 1833, the Philadelphia Library Company of Colored Persons appealed for “such books and other donations as will facilitate the object of this institution.” By 1838, this library had 600 volumes. Since Negroes could not enjoy the same privileges as whites in libraries, they established for themselves some 45 literary societies between 1828 and 1846 in several large cities, mainly in the East, most of which maintained reading rooms and circulating libraries. As a consequence of these activities many Negroes were stimulated to assemble private libraries. In 1838, in Philadelphia and nearby cities, there were 8333 volumes in private libraries. In New York City, David Ruggles, a Negro abolitionist, pamphleteer, and printer, was probably the first Negro book collector. He maintained a circulating library and made antislavery and colonization publications available to many readers. He charged a fee of less than twenty-five cents a month for renting books relating to the Negro and slavery.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerri Trombley

Stanton, Brandon. Little humans. New York, NY: Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers, 2014. PrintFrom the creator of Humans of New York, comes the most dynamic, colourful and diverse group of little people of New York City. Brandon Stanton’s ability to capture the unique personalities of his subjects and “tell” a story through pictures is both captivating and brilliantly vivid. The ‘Little Humans’ are shown throughout the book in bright close-ups and even brighter clothing. Each page is filled in entirely with a close-up photograph of a child in different situations. Cultural diversity and differences are prominent in the photographs, but the text tackles the sameness we all share.“Little humans can be tough…but not too tough to need a hug.”Set against New York City streets, Little Humans embodies the ethnic diversity of the people of NYC. The text is limited, but has themes of resiliency, strength, identity and character woven throughout. Stanton writes of how little people are strong, talented and helpful.The story itself could have been written with more depth; however, the lack of narrative allows the reader to engage with the photographs and imagine the story of each unique person that is highlighted.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Kerri TrombleyKerri Trombley is a Vice Principal with Sturgeon School Division and is currently completing her Master’s Degree in Elementary Education at the University of Alberta. She shares her love of literature with all of her students.


Author(s):  
Ann L. Buttenwieser

Why on earth would anyone want to float a pool up the Atlantic coastline to bring it to rest at a pier on the New York City waterfront? This book recounts the author's triumphant adventure that started in the bayous of Louisiana and ended with a self-sustaining, floating swimming pool moored in New York Harbor. When the author decided something needed to be done to help revitalize the New York City waterfront, she reached into the city's nineteenth-century past for inspiration. The author wanted New Yorkers to reestablish their connection to their riverine surroundings and she was energized by the prospect of city youth returning to the Hudson and East rivers. What she didn't suspect was that outfitting and donating a swimming facility for free enjoyment by the public would turn into an almost-Sisyphean task. As the book describes, the author battled for years with politicians and struggled with bureaucrats to bring her “crazy” scheme to fruition. The book retells the improbable process that led to a pool named The Floating Pool Lady tying up to a pier at Barretto Point Park in the Bronx, ready for summer swimmers. Throughout, the book raises consciousness about persistent environmental issues and the challenges of developing a constituency for projects to make cities livable in the twenty-first century. The story functions as both warning and inspiration to those who dare to dream of realizing innovative public projects in the modern urban landscape.


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