New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

White Supremacy

Manhattan in Flames: Arson, Rebellion, Conspiracy, & Sabotage

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Detail from, "Southern Gentleman (about to Fire the Hotel" a cartoon showing a Confederate arsonist setting a fire in Manhattan (Harper’s Weekly, 1864)Early British colonists brought English common law to the colonies and adapted it to frontier conditions. Formally known as Lawes Divine, Morall and Martiall, “Dale’s Code” was a legal system enacted in 1610 (published in 1612) by the Deputy-Governor of colonial Virginia, Thomas Dale.

It mandated the death penalty for a range of misdeeds, from stealing grapes to trading with Indigenous populations. Arson too was a capital crime. [Read more…] about Manhattan in Flames: Arson, Rebellion, Conspiracy, & Sabotage

Newcomers: Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York

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Newcomers: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New YorkA man thought to be a Muslim from Morocco and a German barmaid fleeing poverty are hardly the images we have of America’s august founders. In Newcomers (Liveright, 2026), Alan Mikhail upends the traditional story of America’s origins through the revelatory tale of a seventeenth-century immigrant couple by the names of Anthony and Grietje.

Married in Amsterdam, the destitute pair emerged from lives of piracy and prostitution in Europe and arrived in 1630s Dutch New Amsterdam, hoping to build a new life. Upon landing on New York City’s shores, the swarthy Anthony was attacked for being the Muslim he was not, while Grietje, branded a whore by crude harbor denizens, would become the model of an independent colonial American woman, defiantly mooning her attackers rather than accepting their derision. [Read more…] about Newcomers: Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York

Slaveholders’ Mutiny: Frederick Douglass & The Southern Insurrection

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"Rebel Atrocities," Harper's Weekly Magazine, May 21, 1864 Civil WarIn a July 4, 1862 speech to an audience of about 2,000 people in Himrod’s Corner, in Yates County, NY, Frederick Douglass described what we now remember as the American Civil War as a “slaveholders’ mutiny.”

As a recent New York Times op-ed pointed out, naming that war is very much a political decision that shapes and is shaped by our view of the past and American history. During the war it was usually referred to as an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Civil War is a more neutral term that avoids placing blame for ripping the country apart or branding the Southern actions as treasonous and ignores the future of slavery in the United States as the fundamental cause of the war. [Read more…] about Slaveholders’ Mutiny: Frederick Douglass & The Southern Insurrection

‘Strung Up’ Explains How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children

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Strung Up How White America Learned to Lynch Black ChildrenStrung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children (Beacon Press, 2026) examines how the lynching of Black children became not an aberration, but a normalized feature of American racial violence.

Drawing on meticulous archival research Strung Up traces how white supremacy trained itself socially, culturally, and psychologically to tolerate and ritualize the destruction of Black childhood, including the unborn. [Read more…] about ‘Strung Up’ Explains How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children

How Race Shadows the America’s Anniversaries

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America, USA: How Race Shadows the Nation's AnniversariesAmerica, USA: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries (Crown Publishers, 2026) details a heart-wrenching exploration of America’s legacy. It is a complex combination of lessons and voices — from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin Luther King, Jr.— that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous future. [Read more…] about How Race Shadows the America’s Anniversaries

The Killing Fields of East New York

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The Killing Fields of East New YorkOn a warm summer evening in 1991, seventeen-year-old Julia Parker was murdered in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York. An area known for an exorbitant level of violence and crime, East New York had come to be known as the “Killing Fields.”

In the six months after Julia Parker’s death, 62 more people were murdered in the same area. In the early 1990s, murder rates in the neighborhood climbed to the highest in NYPD history. East New York was dying. [Read more…] about The Killing Fields of East New York

New York: Named For World’s Most Prolific Slave Trader

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King James II by Peter LelyA new book, The Crown’s Silence, The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas by Brooke Newman (Mariner Books, 2026), challenges the myth that Great Britain and its monarchs championed the abolition of slavery and details the royal family’s complicity with and profit from the slave trade and the sale of slave produced commodities.

It also reminds us that New York is named for the world’s most prolific slave trader. [Read more…] about New York: Named For World’s Most Prolific Slave Trader

Emma Lazarus, Nativism & The Gates of Immigration

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"Come UNto Me Ye Opprest!," a nativist, anti-Italian and anti-Anarchist cartoon by James Alley published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, July 5, 1919Poet Emma Lazarus was active from the mid-1860s until her death in 1887. She descended from a well-established Sephardic family in Manhattan. Her presence coincided with the arrival of waves of Ashkenazi refugees from Eastern Europe. Their customs, Yiddish language, and political activism were distinct from the assimilated Sephardic community.

Emma created two contrasting sonnets on immigration, both dated 1883. Set against the socio-political background of their time of publication, these poems highlight some of the historical and continuous controversies surrounding the issue. [Read more…] about Emma Lazarus, Nativism & The Gates of Immigration

Apocalyptic Abolitionism & The End of Slavery

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Apocalyptic AbolitionismIn March 1844, Melissa Botsford of Meriden, Connecticut, defiantly left her local Methodist church because it supported slavery and other “sins” that permeated America.

Botsford was among one hundred thousand other abolitionists who abandoned their evangelical churches throughout the decade. These protesters came out with a stern apocalyptic warning: God would soon judge America ― and its churches ― for the sins of slavery and race prejudice. [Read more…] about Apocalyptic Abolitionism & The End of Slavery

The Voting Rights Act & The Great Betrayal of 1877

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March 5, 1877 view of the grand stand during the inauguration of Rutherford B Hayes in Washington DCOn April 24, 1877, on orders from President Rutherford B. Hayes, federal troops withdrew from the state house in Louisiana — the last federally defended state house in the South — just 12 years after the end of the Civil War.

This withdrawal marked the end of Reconstruction and paved the way for the unrestrained resurgence of white supremacist rule in the South, carrying with it the rapid deterioration of political rights for Black Americans.

What began with Hayes’s elevation to the Presidency following the disputed Election of 1876, is now having dramatic political consequences 150 years later. [Read more…] about The Voting Rights Act & The Great Betrayal of 1877

Seth Concklin: A Daring, Dedicated New York Abolitionist

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Freedom Seekers leave Maryland for Pennsylvania, ca. 1830, from William Still's The Underground Railroad (1872) (colorized)Many New Yorkers before the Civil War contributed to the abolition of slavery, and the dangerous work of helping enslaved African-Americans flee their captors. Take Calvin Fairbank, a New York Methodist pastor born 1816, who spent 17 years in prison for his missions to help enslaved people escape.

Seth Concklin, a New Yorker whose name and sacrifice were more familiar in the 19th century, died tragically in 1851 while trying to help a mother and her three children escape from slavery. [Read more…] about Seth Concklin: A Daring, Dedicated New York Abolitionist

April 1989: Five Innocent Teens Charged for Central Park Rape

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The Central Park Five in court (photo by James Estrin for The New York Times)On April 19, 1989, a white woman was brutally raped and beaten in New York City’s Central Park. Police officers soon arrested a dozen young men and eventually charged five teenage boys ranging from 14-16 years of age.

Police subjected Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana Jr., Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, and Antron McCray to hours of intense interrogation and ultimately extracted confessions. [Read more…] about April 1989: Five Innocent Teens Charged for Central Park Rape

Frederick Law Olmsted’s Reports on Slavery in the South

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Frederick Law Olmsted in the mid-nineteenth century (courtesy National Park Service)From December 1852 until August 1854, Frederick Law Olmsted, who later gained renown as a landscape architect for designing New York City’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, traveled through the American South as a special correspondent for the New-York Daily Times, the predecessor of The New York Times.

His reports published by the Times under the name Yeoman, were included in a 1856 book as A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States; With Remarks on Their Economy. [Read more…] about Frederick Law Olmsted’s Reports on Slavery in the South

Albany’s Underground Railroad Education Center Sues Trump Regime

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Underground Railroad Education Center in Albany, NYUnderground Railroad Education Center (UREC) in Albany, New York asserts in a lawsuit Friday that the Trump administration through the National Endowment for the Humanities unlawfully terminated its federal grant on the racially motivated bias, pointing to President Donald Trump‘s efforts to
dismantle diversity-focused initiatives.

The lawsuit alleges that the National Endowment for the Humanities’ cancellation of a $250,000 grant amounted to viewpoint and racial discrimination, violating the First and Fifth Amendments, respectively. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of New York and calls for the funds to be reinstated. [Read more…] about Albany’s Underground Railroad Education Center Sues Trump Regime

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life

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Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary LifeElizabeth Cady Stanton was a singular leader, thinker, and organizer whose fight for women’s emancipation stretched from the 1840s to her death in 1902, a full fifth of America’s history. Yet her legacy is marked by controversy.

In a new biography, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life (Basic Books, 2026) historian Ellen Carol DuBois paints a fresh portrait of this complex woman whose work helped make contemporary feminism possible. [Read more…] about Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life

When Indians Were Barred From Citizenship by the Supreme Court

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Bhagat Singh ThindOn February 19, 1923, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling legally barring all Indians from becoming U.S. citizens and revoking citizenship from many who had attained it.

Bhagat Singh Thind (1892-1967), an Indian Sikh man born in Punjab, migrated to the U.S. in 1913. After enlisting in the U.S. Army and serving in World War One, Thind applied and obtained approval for citizenship in 1920. [Read more…] about When Indians Were Barred From Citizenship by the Supreme Court

Suffolk County Honors former Slaveholder William Floyd

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Detail of portrait of William Floyd by Robert Ealre in front of his estate in Old Mastic, New York on Long Island (Independence Hall)Suffolk County, New York, declared December 17th William Floyd Day. According to Suffolk County Executive Edward Romaine, William Floyd was the only Long Islander to sign the Declaration of Independence and his birthday should be commemorated every year.

He was also the largest slaveholder in Brookhaven. Floyd’s estate was at Old Mystic near present day Mystic Beach is operated by the National Park Service. There is also a contested seven-foot-tall statue of William Floyd at the intersection of William Floyd Parkway and Montauk Highway in nearby Shirley, NY. [Read more…] about Suffolk County Honors former Slaveholder William Floyd

Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History

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Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History by David McNallyKarl Marx’s writings on enslavement and labor have fallen out of favor among historians, but David McNally injects new life into them.

Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History (University of California Press, 2025) gives what may be the first systematic Marxist account of the capitalist character of Atlantic slavery — using colonial travel literature, planter records and diaries, and slave narratives — to support the provocative claim for enslaved labor in the plantation system as capitalist commodity production. [Read more…] about Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History

White Supremacist George Wallace & New York State

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George Wallace deliver his white supremacist inaugural address on January 14 1963On January 14, 1963, after being overwhelmingly elected by white Alabama voters, George Wallace (1919-1998), the infamous segregationist and white supremacist, delivered his inaugural address and called for “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” Throughout his speech he condemned integration and criticized federal intervention in state affairs.

Running for office almost a decade after Brown v. Board of Education, Wallace’s 1962 campaign used the slogan “Stand up for Alabama,” and he vowed to fight integration at the University of Alabama. [Read more…] about White Supremacist George Wallace & New York State

FASCISM! An Army Orientation Fact Sheet, 1945

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1941 World War II poster from the United States denouncing fifth columnists (National Archives)Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze; nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.

Points to stress are: (1) Fascism is more apt to come to power at a time of economic crisis; (2) fascism inevitably leads to war; (3) it can come to any country; (4) we can best combat it by making our democracy work.

“Fascism” is a word that’s been used a great deal these last few years. We come across it in our newspapers, we hear it in our newsreels, it comes up in our bull sessions. We’ve heard about the cruelties of fascism, its terror, its conquest of country after country. [Read more…] about FASCISM! An Army Orientation Fact Sheet, 1945

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