Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York: From the Suppressed to the Strange

Join us for this book talk as author Jonathan Ezra Goldman discusses his new book, Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York: From the Suppressed to the Strange

Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York offers a fresh look at 1920s New York City, unearthing stories of everyday life and marginalized communities. In sections that intertwine entertainment, politics, art, technology, crime, shopping, eating, and recreation, the book portrays sweeping events such as the Harlem Renaissance, Prohibition, and immigration reform through anecdotes of individual experiences that counter the era’s popular conceptions of ballooning wealth and uproarious celebration. This whirlwind tour of early 1920s New York City visits an all-female police platoon, a Black amusement park shut down before it opened, socialist Puerto Rican cigar factories, Chinatown funerals, overcrowded jails, toxic dumps, and Ku Klux Klan recruitment offices.

Along the way we’ll meet Greenwich Village denizens such as Khalil Gibran, and his Arabic literary salon, and Eve Adams, and the lesbian cafe she ran in the neighborhood. This is the backdrop to the everyday challenges and triumphs of a city beset by crowds, automobile traffic, and rapidly changing technology and urban infrastructure, as well as erased stories of injustices like Jim Crow practices, immigration anxieties, and the violent treatment of political dissent.