The Bowery Boys: New York City History
There are several enemies in Candice Millard‘s Destiny of the Republic, the terrific 2011 narrative history of the assassination of President James Garfield during the summer of 1881. The most obvious foe is the delusional Charles Guiteau, who believed himself the nation’s savior when he shot President Garfield twice at a Washington DC train station… Read More
Robert Allerton lived without a care thanks to his family’s Gilded Age fortune, built from the stockyards of Chicago’s meat processing district. As a young man, Allerton used his inherited wealth to maintain the family estate near Monticello, Illinois, cultivating a garden escape where he could be left to his own devices. And then, in… Read More
The Bowery Boys podcast is going on a road trip. Presenting a new three part podcast series, exploring three historic places outside of New York City. It’s a Bowery Boys Road Trip to Long Island! Listen to the trailer here: Greg Young · Long Island Trailer We’re headed to the lands beyond Brooklyn and Queens… Read More
PODCAST One of America’s most important books was published 225 years ago this year. You won’t find it on a shelf of great American literature. It was not written by a great man of letters, but somebody who described herself simply as ‘an American orphan.’ EPISODE 354 In 1796 a mysterious woman named Amelia Simmons published American Cookery,… Read More
PODCAST This month marks the 185th anniversary of one of the most devastating disasters in New York City history — The Great Fire of 1835. This massive fire, among the worst in American history in terms of its economic impact, devastated the city during one freezing December evening, destroying hundreds of shops and warehouses and changing… Read More
On a usual day, lunchtime down on Wall Street today is chaotic mess of brokers and bankers on cell phones, tour groups, messengers on bikes, police officers, construction workers, people delivering lunch and perhaps a stray older lady walking her dog. One hundred years ago today, in 1920, it would have practically been the same, sans… Read More
In the fall of 1783 Lewis Morris, signer of the Declaration of Independence, helpfully suggested in a letter to the Continental Congress that his own bucolic estate Morrisania (in today’s area of the South Bronx) would make a fine home for the new capital of the United States. That didn’t happen, of course, but the Bronx… Read More
One hundred and fifty years ago this month, Henrietta Wood sued the man who kidnapped her and sold her back into slavery. In his lifetime, that man — a prison warden and general scoundrel named Zebulon Ward — often bragged about losing the case, saying “he was the last American ever to pay for a… Read More
EPISODE 308 In the final decades of his life, steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie — one of the richest Americans to ever live — began giving his money away. The Scots American had worked his way up from a railroad telegraph office to amass an unimaginable fortune, acquired in a variety of industries — railroads, bridge… Read More
PODCAST The epic tale of Ellis Island and the process by which millions of new immigrants entered the United States. For millions of Americans, Ellis Island is the symbol of introduction, the immigrant depot that processed their ancestors and offered an opening into a new American life. But for some, it would truly be an ‘Island… Read More
“Hickok was a celebrity. He was famous. He was feared. He was already a legend. It is estimated that over fifteen hundred dime novels were written just about Buffalo Bill Cody, beginning in 1869, when he was only twenty-three, into the 1930s, and during the early years. Wild Bill was in that category of iconic… Read More
PODCAST The origin of the Atlantic Cable — the first telegraph connection between the Old and the New Worlds — and the role of New York City in its creation. New Yorkers threw a wild, exuberant celebration in the summer of 1858 in honor of ‘the eighth wonder of the world’, a technological achievement that… Read More
PODCAST The words of “The New Colossus,” written 135 years ago by Jewish poet Emma Lazarus in tribute to the Statue of Liberty, have never been more relevant — or as hotly debated — as they are today. What do they mean to you? “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse of your… Read More
Forty years ago today, New York City was plunged into darkness. The city has certainly seen longer blackouts in its history but none as violent or as deadly in its effects than the Blackout of 1977. The deteriorating city, in the midst of a withering heat wave, was ill-equipped for such emergencies. Hundreds of stores… Read More
PODCAST Part One of our two-part series on New York City in the years following the Revolutionary War. The story of New York City’s role in the birth of American government is sometimes forgotten. Most of the buildings important to the first U.S. Congress, which met here from the spring of 1789 to the late… Read More