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Immigration

Chinese Restaurant History in New York City

February 2, 2023 by Guest Contributor Leave a Comment

Canton RestaurantThe first known Chinese restaurant in America, Canton Restaurant, is believed to have opened in San Francisco in 1849. Today, according to the Chinese American Restaurant Association, more than 45,000 Chinese restaurants operate across the United States, more than all the McDonald’s, KFCs, Pizza Huts, Taco Bells and Wendy’s combined.

Their story begins with Chinese immigrants to California in the mid-nineteenth century — mostly from Canton province — drawn by the Gold Rush of 1849 and fleeing economic problems and famine in China. Though some headed to the gold fields, most Chinese immigrants to the San Francisco Bay area provided services for the miners as traders, grocers, merchants and restaurant owners. [Read more…] about Chinese Restaurant History in New York City

Filed Under: Food, History, New York City Tagged With: Asian-American, Culinary History, Cultural History, Gold Rush of 1849, Immigration, Labor History, Manhattan, New York City

The Queen of Greenwich Village: Romany Marie Marchand

January 17, 2023 by Jaap Harskamp 6 Comments

Au bistroThe coffee habit was introduced into Western Europe in the mid-seventeenth century. The emergence of the London coffeehouse transformed various aspects of intellectual and commercial life. Lloyd’s insurance, the postal system and the auction house are some of the institutions that trace their origins back to the coffeehouse.

At a time that journalism was in its infancy, the coffeehouse provided a center of communication and news dissemination. It served as a forum of discussion, often becoming a hotbed of political strife and faction. Coffeehouse culture helped shape the public sphere of the Enlightenment. [Read more…] about The Queen of Greenwich Village: Romany Marie Marchand

Filed Under: Arts, Food, History, New York City Tagged With: Art History, Culinary History, Cultural History, Education, French History, Greenwich Village, Immigration, London, Manhattan, modernism, New York City, womens history

Massacres & Migrants at Sea: Deadly Voyages To New York

January 11, 2023 by Jaap Harskamp 1 Comment

Diagram (1787) of the Liverpool-launched slave ship BrookesThe 1840s brought about a transformation in the nature of transatlantic shipping. With the development of European colonial empires, the forced transportation of African slaves had become big business.

Liverpool was the focus of the British slave trade. As a result of crusading abolitionist movements and subsequent legal intervention, the brutal practice declined there during that decade. But more or less simultaneously a new form of people trafficking took its place. [Read more…] about Massacres & Migrants at Sea: Deadly Voyages To New York

Filed Under: Arts, History, New York City Tagged With: Abolition, Art History, Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic World, British Atlantic, British Empire, Immigration, Irish Immigrants, Legal History, London, Maritime History, natural disasters, New York City, Slavery, Transportation History

Taddeus Kosciusko: A Hero of Two Worlds (& The Name On That Bridge)

January 4, 2023 by Guest Contributor 10 Comments

Twin Bridges I-87 NorthwaySince it opened to traffic on April 11, 1960, millions of vehicles traveling the I-87 Northway have passed over the Mohawk River on what they think are called on “The Twin Bridges.” That bridge however, is really named for a Polish-American hero of the American Revolution – Taddeus Kosciusko. [Read more…] about Taddeus Kosciusko: A Hero of Two Worlds (& The Name On That Bridge)

Filed Under: Adirondacks & NNY, History, Hudson Valley - Catskills, Mohawk Valley Tagged With: American Revolution, Army Corps of Engineers, Battle of Saratoga, Engineering History, Essex County, Fort Ticonderoga, Hudson River, I-87, Immigration, John Burgoyne, Lake Champlain, Lake George, Military History, Mohawk River, Mount Defiance, Polish History, Saratoga County, Schuylerville, Taddeus Kosciusko, Warren County, Washington County, Waterford, West Point

Manhattan’s Great Art Dealers: Some History

January 4, 2023 by Jaap Harskamp 1 Comment

Mary Mason Jones’ marble mansionManhattan’s 57th Street, the world’s “most expensive” street, was laid out and opened in 1857 as the city of New York expanded northward.

With the Hudson and East Rivers on either end, the area was until then largely uninhabited and clustered with small factories and workshops. As late as the 1860s, the area east of Central Park was a shantytown with up to 5,000 squatters.

Half a century later it was Manhattan’s cultural heart and an intercontinental meeting place of artists, collectors and dealers. [Read more…] about Manhattan’s Great Art Dealers: Some History

Filed Under: Arts, History, New York City Tagged With: Architecture, Art History, French History, German-American History, Immigration, Impressionism, Manhattan, modernism, Museum of Modern Art, Museums, New York City, painting, spanish history

Mayonnaise, Hollandaise, Huguenots and Nostalgia: A Culinary History

December 20, 2022 by Jaap Harskamp 2 Comments

Advertising piece for Richard Hellmann's Blue Ribbon Mayonnaise, 1926What and where a person eats, suggests togetherness with one community and dis-identification with another and is therefore a factor that affects all migrant communities. Consumption conveys an idea of public identity.

Food can also serve as a psychological stimulus by unlocking emotional childhood reminiscences. Such experiences have frequently been expressed creatively. There are, for example, the uncooked wrinkled French prunes for Tolstoy’s Ivan Il’ich or the famous “petites madeleines” for Marcel Proust’s Swann that recapture vivid images of early years. [Read more…] about Mayonnaise, Hollandaise, Huguenots and Nostalgia: A Culinary History

Filed Under: Food, History, New York City Tagged With: Culinary History, French History, German-American History, Huguenots, Immigration, Long Island City, Manhattan, Netherlands, New York City, Queens

When Two Dutchmen Tried To Create A Maple Sugar Industry

December 16, 2022 by Jaap Jacobs Leave a Comment

portrait of Gerrit BoonThe Holland Land Company is known for its role in settling the western part of upstate New York by acquiring land grants and selling off lots to prospective settlers in the early nineteenth century. Yet its activities in the last decade of the eighteenth century were of a different nature, as the stories of Gerrit Boon and Jan Lincklaen show.

In the last decade of the eighteenth century, two young Dutchmen, Gerrit Boon and Jan Lincklaen, traveled through the densely forested lands of Upstate New York. They eventually identified locations fit for the founding of the new villages of Oldenbarneveld (now Barneveld in Oneida County) and DeRuyter (in Madison County). [Read more…] about When Two Dutchmen Tried To Create A Maple Sugar Industry

Filed Under: Food, History, Western NY Tagged With: Barneveld, Boonville, Cazenovia, Dutch History, Forestry, Fort Schuyler, Holland Land Company, Holland Patent, Immigration, Industrial History, Lincklaen, Lorenzo SHS, Madison County, Maple Sugaring, Maple Trees, Oneida County

Italian Heroes In New York: What Purpose Did Statues Serve?

December 14, 2022 by Jaap Harskamp 1 Comment

Bust of Italian Patriot Giuseppe MazziniNationalism of the nineteenth century represents very different values to those of our era. With the present rise of frenzied flag-waving and militant xenophobia, it is hard to understand the cult status achieved by foreign revolutionary figures such as Lafayette, who was honored as the “French Hero of the American Revolution.”

In 1878 a bust of Giuseppe Mazzini was unveiled in New York City‘s Central Park. A decade later, on the sixth anniversary of his death, Giuseppe Garibaldi was memorialized with a bronze statue in Washington Square Park. Why were these relatively unknown Italian insurgents given such a prestigious presence in New York? [Read more…] about Italian Heroes In New York: What Purpose Did Statues Serve?

Filed Under: History, New York City Tagged With: Art History, Central Park, French History, Greenwich Village, Immigration, Italian History, Manhattan, Monuments, New York City, Revolutions of 1848, sculpture, Staten Island

Culture War, Transatlantic Migration & The Wreck of the SS Deutschland

December 6, 2022 by Jaap Harskamp 3 Comments

An 1875 caricature of Bismarck and Pope Pius IX playing a game of chess symbolizing the Kulturkampf (Culture War)Following the mid-nineteenth century revolution in steamship building, transatlantic passenger transport became a profitable enterprise. Travel went global, giving rise to an intercontinental “travel industry.”

Commercial oceanic transportation boomed. Bremen-based NDL (Norddeutscher Lloyd) and Hamburg-based HAPAG (Hamburg Amerikanische Packetfahrt Aktiengesellschaft) became the largest shipping companies in the world. [Read more…] about Culture War, Transatlantic Migration & The Wreck of the SS Deutschland

Filed Under: Arts, History, New York City Tagged With: Atlantic Ocean, Catholicism, Cultural History, German-American History, Immigration, Nativism, Poetry, Religious History, Shipwrecks, Steamboating

When Manhattan Spoke German: Lüchow’s, Würzburger & Little Germany

November 2, 2022 by Jaap Harskamp 6 Comments

Lüchow’s in April 1896Since it foundation, German settlers had been present in New Amsterdam (Peter Minuit was a native of Wesel am Rhein), but the significant arrival of German-speaking migrants took place towards the middle of the nineteenth century. By 1840 more than 24,000 of them had made New York their home.

In the next two decades, when large parts of the territory were plunged into deep socio-political and economic problems, another hundred thousand Germans crossed the Atlantic turning New York into the world’s third-largest German-speaking city, after Berlin and Vienna. [Read more…] about When Manhattan Spoke German: Lüchow’s, Würzburger & Little Germany

Filed Under: Arts, Food, History, New York City Tagged With: beer, Culinary History, Cultural History, German-American History, Immigration, Lower East Side, Manhattan, Nativism, New York City, Performing Arts, Prohibition, World War One

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