Police and the Empire City

Police and the Empire City
Author: Matthew Guariglia
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2022-10-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1478027541

During the years between the Civil War and World War II, police in New York City struggled with how to control a diverse city. In Police and the Empire City Matthew Guariglia tells the history of the New York Police to show how its origins were built upon and inseparably entwined with the history of race, ethnicity, and whiteness in the United States. Guariglia explores the New York City Police Department through its periods of experimentation and violence as police experts import tactics from the US occupation of the Philippines and Cuba, devise modern bureaucratic techniques to better suppress Black communities, and infiltrate supposedly unknowable immigrant neighborhoods. Innovations ranging from recruiting Chinese, Italian, or German police to form “ethnic squads,” the use of deportation and federal immigration restrictions to control local crime—even the introduction of fingerprinting—were motivated by attempts to govern a multiracial city. Campaigns to remake the police department created an urban landscape where power, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, crime, and bodies collided and provided a foundation for the supposedly “colorblind,” technocratic, federally backed, and surveillance-based policing of today.

The Essential Kerner Commission Report

The Essential Kerner Commission Report
Author: Jelani Cobb
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2021-07-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1631498932

Recognizing that an historic study of American racism and police violence should become part of today’s canon, Jelani Cobb contextualizes it for a new generation. The Kerner Commission Report, released a month before Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, is among a handful of government reports that reads like an illuminating history book—a dramatic, often shocking, exploration of systemic racism that transcends its time. Yet Columbia University professor and New Yorker correspondent Jelani Cobb argues that this prescient report, which examined more than a dozen urban uprisings between 1964 and 1967, has been woefully neglected. In an enlightening new introduction, Cobb reveals how these uprisings were used as political fodder by Republicans and demonstrates that this condensed edition of the Report should be essential reading at a moment when protest movements are challenging us to uproot racial injustice. A detailed examination of economic inequality, race, and policing, the Report has never been more relevant, and demonstrates to devastating effect that it is possible for us to be entirely cognizant of history and still tragically repeat it.

Empire City

Empire City
Author: Kenneth T. Jackson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 1026
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780231109086

This major anthology brings together the best literary writing about New York--from O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Steinbeck to Paul Auster and James Baldwin.

Heir to the Empire City

Heir to the Empire City
Author: Edward P. Kohn
Publisher: Basic Civitas Books
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2013-12-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465024297

Theodore Roosevelt is best remembered as America’s prototypical “cowboy” president—a Rough Rider who derived his political wisdom from a youth spent in the untamed American West. But while the great outdoors certainly shaped Roosevelt’s identity, historian Edward P. Kohn argues that it was his hometown of New York that made him the progressive president we celebrate today. During his early political career, Roosevelt took on local Republican factions and Tammany Hall Democrats alike, proving his commitment to reform at all costs. He combated the city’s rampant corruption, and helped to guide New York through the perils of rabid urbanization and the challenges of accommodating an influx of immigrants—experiences that would serve him well as president of the United States. A riveting account of a man and a city on the brink of greatness, Heir to the Empire City reveals that Roosevelt’s true education took place not in the West but on the mean streets of nineteenth-century New York.

The Empire City

The Empire City
Author: Selma C. Berrol
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1997-02-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1567507107

There has always been a symbiotic relationship between New York City and the people who have settled there. This study traces the major developments on Manhattan Island, which began as a base for privateering, as it evolved into one of the world's great cities. At the same time, the author also describes the background, the adjustments that had to be made to the New World, and the contributions of the millions who chose to settle there. There are six chronological chapters, each discussing the groups who came in the years as covered by that chapter, the city as it was when they arrived, what they added to the city, and how life in New York enabled most to improve their lives. The Irish laborers who came in the middle of the 19th century, for example, contributed enormously to the building of a clean water system. The wages earned from this work allowed them to feed, house and clothe their families while enabling the city to avoid the frequent cholera epidemics that had devastated the city in earlier years.

Policing Cities in Napoleonic Europe

Policing Cities in Napoleonic Europe
Author: Antoine Renglet
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2022-11-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 3031110544

This book shows how the police functioned in the cities of the Napoleonic Empire. Shifting attention away from political repression, it focuses on the men who embodied this institution and made it work day-to-day. Based on extensive archival research, the book shows how the Napoleonic police were indeed an instrument of power, but also a profession and a service to the public. Traditionally associated with the image of Joseph Fouché and with political surveillance, the Napoleonic police, when studied from the local level, thus reveals itself to be much more complex and oriented simultaneously towards both the preservation of the regime and maintaining good urban order.

Empire City

Empire City
Author: Matt Gallagher
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2021-01-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 150117780X

From the author of Youngblood comes a “brilliant and daring” (Phil Klay, award-winning author of Redeployment) novel following a group of super-powered soldiers and civilians as they navigate an imperial America on the precipice of a major upheaval—for fans of The Fortress of Solitude and The Plot Against America. Thirty years after its great triumph in Vietnam, the United States has again become mired in an endless foreign war overseas. Stories of super soldiers known as the Volunteers tuck in little American boys and girls every night. Yet domestic politics are aflame—an ex-military watchdog group clashes with police while radical terrorists threaten to expose government experiments within the veteran rehabilitation colonies. Halfway between war and peace, the Volunteers find themselves waiting for orders in the vast American city-state, Empire City. There they encounter a small group of civilians who know the truth about their powers, including Sebastian Rios, a young bureaucrat wrestling with survivor guilt, and Mia Tucker, a wounded army pilot-turned-Wall Street banker. Meanwhile, Jean-Jacques Saint-Preux, a Haitian American Volunteer from the International Legion, decides he’ll do whatever it takes to return to the front lines. Through it all, a controversial retired general emerges as a frontrunner in the presidential campaign, promising to save the country from itself. Her election would mean unprecedented military control over the country, with promises of security and stability—but at what cost? “A passionate, scary, wise, and perhaps even prophetic novel” (Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried), Empire City is a rousing vision of an alternate—yet all too familiar—America on the brink written by a “preeminent voice in American writing” (Sara Novic, author of Girl at War).

Empire City

Empire City
Author: David M. Scobey
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2002
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781592132355

For generations, New Yorkers have joked about "The City's" interminable tearing down and building up. The city that the whole world watches seems to be endlessly remaking itself. When the locals and the rest of the world say "New York," they mean Manhattan, a crowded island of commercial districts and residential neighborhoods, skyscrapers and tenements, fabulously rich and abjectly poor cheek by jowl. Of course, it was not always so; New York's metamorphosis from compact port to modern metropolis occurred during the mid-nineteenth century. Empire City tells the story of the dreams that inspired the changes in the landscape and the problems that eluded solution.Author David Scobey paints a remarkable panorama of New York's uneven development, a city-building process careening between obsessive calculation and speculative excess. Envisioning a new kind of national civilization, "bourgeois urbanists" attempted to make New York the nation's pre-eminent city. Ultimately, they created a mosaic of grand improvements, dynamic change, and environmental disorder. Empire City sets the stories of the city's most celebrated landmarks--Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, the downtown commercial center--within the context of this new ideal of landscape design and a politics of planned city building. Perhaps such an ambitious project for guiding growth, overcoming spatial problems, and uplifting the public was bound to fail; still, it grips the imagination.