New York: An Illustrated History of the People - Hardcover

Schoener, Allon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393045811 ISBN 13: 9780393045819

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998

Synopsis

The definitive pictorial history of the diverse peoples of the world who have made New York their home.

According to the 1990 census, New York, for the first time in a century, had more foreign-born inhabitants than native-born residents. A city of continual immigration, New York's people have been documented by major artists and photographers from the earliest European settlers to the present. In this majestic illustrated history, with over 500 prints, paintings, and photographs, many never before published, we see the arrival of the first wave of Dutch and Anglo-Saxon settlers in the seventeenth century. We progress through Irish and German immigrations in the mid-nineteenth century, the immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of vast numbers of Italians and Eastern European Jews as well as Greeks and Slavs, followed by African Americans moving from the South after World War I. Finally, as the twentieth century comes to a close, Caribbeans, Latinos, Africans, and Asians have become the dominant new New Yorkers. As he did with Harlem on My Mind, The Lower East Side, American Jewish Album, and The Italian Americans, Allon Schoener has brought together wonderful images as well as documentary accounts from diaries, letters, news articles, and other sources, giving us the rich history and texture of this great city. Over 500 prints, paintings, and photographs

About this title

Review:

Like the city it celebrates, this book is huge, filled with a myriad of images, and it boasts a diversity that is nearly overwhelming. Each of its hundreds of two-page spreads focuses on a particular theme, using illustrations and captions to tell the story of New York and New Yorkers. Beginning with Verrazano's first European contact with the area in 1524, the book takes the reader on a long and scenic journey up to the present day. The book provides a wonderful opportunity to see what New York and New Yorkers looked like, and the text, while seeming at first glance to be merely captions for the thousands of illustration, does provide some serious (and very entertaining) history. --Robert McNamara

About the Author:

Allon Schoener is a renowned author and curator. He lives in Grafton, Vermont.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0393045811
• ISBN 13: 9780393045819
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416