To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses,
towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that
teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today,
it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building
and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have
come from every corner of the nation and the globe.
In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a
monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that
settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of
the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic
narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and
it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation.
Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under
the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian
wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat
of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heights, the destructive seven years of
British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel
between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming
of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial center,
the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of
immigrants, the rise of
mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of
the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast
of thousands--the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune;
Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich Village from the city's street-grid
plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life;
and Walt Whitman, who happily celebrated that same life. We meet the
rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Boss Tweed and his
nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis
and Horace Greeley; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel
Waring and his "white angels" (who revolutionized the sanitation
department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August
Belmont, and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their
mark on this great city.
The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no
mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of
America, and a book that will mesmerize everyone interested in the peaks
and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth.
Gotham is a dazzling read, a fast-paced, brilliant narrative that
carries the reader along as it threads hundreds of stories into one
great blockbuster of a book.
