Book Review

Canada and the United States

Those who would write a comprehensive narrative history of New York City—or any large city—face a multitude of challenges. How can such a work reconcile the storyteller's need for an authoritative, compelling, and entertaining voice with the contemporary historian's respect for the dignity and the distinctive perspectives of all the city's residents, past and present? Can the narrative provide a sustained interpretation of the city's place in its larger political, economic, environmental, cultural contexts? What are its responsibilities to race, class, gender, the environment? What are the synthesizers' responsibilities to the sources and to the many earlier historians on whom they draw?	1
This book by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace represents a heroic effort to respond to these challenges. Its vast quantity of material, chronological order, respect for current and received wisdom, detailed table of contents (including well over 200 carefully phrased sub-chapter titles), well-chosen illustrations and well-designed maps, extensive indexes, and meticulous proofreading make it an exceptionally useful companion to the recent Encyclopedia of New York City (1995). Its detailed discussions of European violence against Native Americans, white violence against Africans and African-Americans, male violence against women, nativist oppression of immigrants, and conflicts between workers and employers restore realism to the genteel and school-civics accounts of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s and their more recent successors. It describes efforts to enforce the moral economy of the crowd, and it vividly illustrates the shift from violent to bureaucratic enforcement of the hegemony of rulers. It dispenses moral praise and, more often, censure. Burrows and Wallace treat New York City as a theater for the performance of many historical dramas; their treasury of memorable incidents and colorful personalities will long delight writers of feature stories and historians seeking to engage or divert their audiences.	2
The book contains four parts that might well have been presented as four separate books about cities of vastly different sizes. These four parts employ three distinct approaches. The first 250 pages provide an excellent synthesis of the work of two generations of historians of New Amsterdam, early New York, and the colonial and revolutionary periods in general. They place the town, whose population grew to about 20,000 in these years, in its imperial and political context, emphasizing the increasingly difficult interactions of New Yorkers and British officials. They focus on New York's relation to the slave-based sugar economies of the Caribbean and other aspects of Atlantic trade but also track population movements, slavery, efforts to establish the Church of England, crowd behavior, and other topics around New York Harbor and the Hudson Valley. This part culminates in detailed accounts of Revolutionary War leaders, political as well as military, who fought within 100 miles of the city.	. . .