COLONIAL GOTHAM

This class is not a “pre-history” of the modern metropolis, but rather a stand-alone story of Gotham’s growth from a tiny Dutch trading post in the midst of hundreds of Native villages into a key port of the first British Empire. We will close at the dramatic moment when the colonial society at the tip of Manhattan was torn apart and partially destroyed in the inter-imperial civil war we know as the American Revolution.

Even when its skyline was made of wooden masts and steeples, New York City was a diverse and dangerous place. Major topics will include frontier wars, slave conspiracies, religious revivals, and conflicts between the legitimate and contraband economies. All along, we will try to balance local and global perspectives, and blend social, cultural, political, and economic analyses. The course will also consider this colonial town’s place in American national memory, and critically approaching the many self-congratulatory and silly stories people like to believe about this long-lost island town.

The central texts in this course are a combination of secondary sources and primary texts. Our weekly meetings will mostly focus on the assigned reading, with each student submitting six (6) short reading responses on Courseworks before 9 am on the day of class. Students will also develop an original fifteen-to-twenty-page research paper on a colonial New York topic of their own choosing, and will be strongly encouraged to use archival resources held at Columbia or one of the city’s other major archives (NYPL, N-YHS, NMAI, Schomburg Center, Municipal Archives).