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Summary
Summary
Harlem is perhaps the most famous, iconic neighborhood in the United States. A bastion of freedom and the capital of Black America, Harlem's twentieth century renaissance changed our arts, culture, and politics forever. But this is only one of the many chapters in a wonderfully rich and varied history. In Harlem , historian Jonathan Gill presents the first complete chronicle of this remarkable place.
From Henry Hudson's first contact with native Harlemites, through Harlem's years as a colonial outpost on the edge of the known world, Gill traces the neighborhood's story, marshaling a tremendous wealth of detail and a host of fascinating figures from George Washington to Langston Hughes. Harlem was an agricultural center under British rule and the site of a key early battle in the Revolutionary War. Later, wealthy elites including Alexander Hamilton built great estates there for entertainment and respite from the epidemics ravaging downtown. In the nineteenth century, transportation urbanized Harlem and brought waves of immigrants from Germany, Italy, Ireland, and elsewhere. Harlem's mix of cultures, extraordinary wealth and extreme poverty was electrifying and explosive.
Extensively researched, impressively synthesized, eminently readable, and overflowing with captivating characters, Harlem is an ambitious, sweeping history, and an impressive achievement.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Historian Gill documents Harlem's transformation from the early days of Dutch settlements and farms to its apogee as the site of one of the 20th century's most influential musical and literary flowerings in a dense, deftly told history. The author takes us from colonial Harlem, so strategically important in the American Revolution, to the 20th-century crucible of African-American arts and intellectual development, a place so vaunted that "Negroes wanted to go to Harlem the way the dead wanted to go to heaven." He invokes a veritable who's who of the black arts and intelligentsia who either called the neighborhood home or launched their careers in its embrace. Gill's analysis of Harlem's decline in the 1970s and the concomitant unemployment and crime is thorough, although his account of the Black Panthers and his analysis of the era's various "disturbances"-particularly a 1967 riot following a fatal episode of police brutality-wants a more nuanced interpretation. From the 1994 economic revitalization to the specter of gentrification, Gill makes a persuasive case that "change is Harlem's defining characteristic," and readers of this vibrant history will appreciate every step of its singular evolution. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* How did Harlem evolve from a Dutch colonial outpost to the most storied of African American neighborhoods? History and literature scholar Gill offers an exquisitely detailed account of the 400-year history of Harlem. Gill tracks Henry Hudson's accidental encounter with the island of Manahatta as he searched for China, the struggle between the Dutch and the British to claim the area, the Revolutionary War, and the later establishment of wealthy estates. He chronicles the waves of immigrants in the nineteenth century, who added to the pulse and texture of the developing urban culture. In the twentieth century, as African Americans migrated from the South and the West Indies, they began to dominate the culture, and the Harlem Renaissance put its indelible stamp on the neighborhood. Gill details major figures from George Washington and Alexander Hamilton to Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X as well as the vibrancy of music, art, literature, religion, politics, and urban sensibility that has come to signify Harlem. Richly researched, the book details the particular blend of street-corner preaching and political proselytizing as well as the drive of black commerce and civil rights that also have come to signify African American Harlem. A vibrant, well-paced, engaging history of an iconic neighborhood.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
Choice Review
Harlem has been the site of extraordinary events and lives. Dutch settlers displaced Indians who lived in northern "Manahatta" and were in turn displaced by British and Americans, including Alexander Hamilton and John James Audubon. Key battles for American independence--and for civil rights--were fought in Harlem. The narrative is structured by profiles of Harlem's famous residents, who arrived with successive waves of immigration. Their lives were shaped first by the area's natural beauty and later by its raw energy, its poverty, and the opportunities in entertainment and the arts, real estate, and business. This book's weaknesses are its riches: too many themes intersect, making it hard to trace a central argument or theory. It is less a book about Harlem than about what took place in Harlem. Gill (Manhattan School of Music) deftly documents early struggles for racial equality after WW I, but sometimes glosses over the divide between "black" Harlem and Spanish Harlem to its east, although tensions endure and contest over resources continues today. The author conducted thorough research, but without endnotes, readers cannot track his references. Nonetheless, an important primer on a fascinating place in US history. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. A. B. Audant CUNY Kingsborough Community College
Kirkus Review
Holland Times arts critic Gill (American History and Literature/Manhattan School of Music) charts the astonishing transformations, upheavals, revolutions and continual renaissances that have affected the uptown terrain and population for hundreds of years.In 1609, Henry Hudson glimpsed the Manhattan shoreline and exchanged fire with the local Indians, thus commencing the cultural clashes that continue in the present. The author traces the story of the area from its geological history to the current times of Al Sharpton (who fares poorly here). In the early chapters, Gill summarizes the stories of the Algonquin people and the original Dutch settlers, who laid out their New Haarlem in the mid 17th century. Then the British decided they owned the island, took over and fecklessly renamed New Haarlem "Lancaster," a name that didn't last long. The author follows the colonial history, the significance of the region in the American Revolution (Washington won a key victory at Harlem Heights) and the transformations wrought by the New York and Harlem Railroad and commerce (and greed). As Gill notes, Harlem was for many decades a center of recreation for downtowners, featuring plentiful forests and beautiful geological formations. Soon, it was human entertainmentmusic, drama, dancing, art and the allures of alcohol and assorted illicit behaviorsthat became the principal attraction. Mansions rose, and the wealthy partied hard. Then Harlem began to attract a wide assortment of minoritiesLatinos, African-Americans, Jews from Eastern Europe, Italians. By the early 19th century, more and more blacks were calling Harlem home, and as the economy cracked, racial fireworks commenced, raged throughout the Civil War and far beyond. As Gill writes, however, the area has long been home to an amazing assortment of talented individualspoliticians (Marcus Garvey), athletes (Lew Alcindor), writers (Langston Hughes), musicians and performers (Paul Robeson), intellectuals (W.E.B. Du Bois) criminals (Casper Holstein).Comprehensive and compassionatean essential text of American history and culture.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The iconic neighborhood is sometimes called "the capital of Black America," but Gill takes readers back to the area's earliest peoples and on through Dutch, British, and American domination. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| 1 Unrighteous Beginnings From Muscoota to Nieuw Haarlem, 1609-1664 | p. 1 |
| 2 Strange Bedfellows British Harlem, 1664-1781 | p. 40 |
| 3 Sweet Asylum Founding an American Harlem, 1781-1811 | p. 63 |
| 4 The Future Is Uptown, 1811-1863 | p. 76 |
| 5 The Flash Age, 1863-1898 | p. 100 |
| 6 Nostra Harlem, Undzere Harlem The Age of Immigration | p. 131 |
| 7 "To Race with the World" The New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance | p. 170 |
| 8 "The Kingdom of Culture" Harlem's Renaissance Comes of Age | p. 226 |
| 9 "Moon Over Harlem" The Great Depression Uptown, 1929-1943 | p. 282 |
| 10 "Tempus Fugue-It" Harlem in the Civil Rights Era, 1943-1965 | p. 334 |
| 11 Harlem Nightmare, 1965-1990 | p. 385 |
| 12 Old and New Dreams Reviving the Renaissance | p. 421 |
| Illustration Credits | p. 465 |
| Sources and Further Reading | p. 469 |
| Index | p. 481 |
