NYC vs. the Axis

Marci Reaven, curator of the New-York Historical Society’s past exhibit, “WWII & NYC,” sits down with John Strausbaugh to discuss his new book, Victory City: A History of New York and New Yorkers during World War II.

The book presents a view of Gotham at the height of its power, when “far more than today, what happened there mattered.” New York, by 1941 the largest city in the world, had the busiest port on Earth, and the greatest number of manufacturing laborers in America. It was the nation’s undisputed center for finance. But it was also a swirling, contradictory mess of Nazi and communist spies, mobsters and liberal reformers, war profiteers and draft resisters, immigrant hordes and fascist sympathizers. Victory City takes readers on a panoramic journey through it all.

Strausbaugh is the award-winning author of City of Sedition: The History of New York During the Civil War and The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village