Fordham Impressions » American Studies

Katz’s Celebrates 125 Years

FUPress — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 15:04:31 +0000

This weekend Katz’s Delicatessen celebrated its 125th anniversary. Katz’s opened in 1888 and survived three depressions and two World Wars. An institution unto itself on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Katz’s shares in New York’s rich history. As waves of immigrants settled in New York’s Lower East Side, Katz’s became the center of the community. Still serving up bagels, lox and cream cheese, Katz’s is a must-see on the LES.

If you are interested in the history of the community that surrounds Katz’s, we recommend curling up with a pastrami sandwich and a copy of The Synagogues of New York’s Lower East Side or Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul. You’ll learn about the goldene medinah (promised land) that became home to many fleeing persecution, poverty, and oppression.

International Women’s Day

FUPress — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 15:34:49 +0000

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Lincoln’s Enduring Legacy

FUPress — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 01:26:06 +0000

Long before Spielberg took on Lincoln, we were publishing books about America’s 16th president—and we continue to do so. From his cabinet’s politics to his own struggles with depression, Lincoln remains the most written-about story in our history. And each year historians find something new and important to write about one of our greatest presidents.

Lincoln Revisited is a brilliant gathering of important scholarship by the leading Lincoln historians of our time. The Lincoln Forum tackles uncharted territory as well as taking a fresh look at established debates (including those about their own landmark works).

Lincoln and Leadership: Military, Political, and Religious Decision Making offers many fresh perspectives. The book explores Lincoln’s leadership through essays focused, respectively, on Lincoln as commander-in-chief, deft political operator, and powerful theologian.

The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln remains one of the most prominent events in U.S. history. It continues to attract enormous and intense interest from scholars, writers, and armchair historians alike, ranging from painstaking new research to wild-eyed speculation.

The Lincoln Assassination: Crime and Punishment, Myth and Memory offers a close look at the assassination itself and the immediate aftermath, chronicling the pursuit and prosecution of the conspirators–a relentless period that isn’t often well covered. All of the contributors are leading Lincoln scholars, and each essay offers a different perspective on an event that shook a still-fledgling nation.

Summers with Lincoln: Looking for the Man in the Monuments won the 2009 J. Owen Grundy History Award for its provoking look at what the 200 statues erected in Lincoln’s honor mean to us as Americans. James Percoco, a high school history teacher, embarked on a journey spanning four summers and an entire country, seeking to understand the significance behind Lincoln’s being the single most commemorated American in history. Along the way, he documents each monument’s history and impact in and on its respective community, discovering the human stories behind the immutable stone. Acclaimed author and Civil War historian James M. McPherson says of the book, “This splendid evocation of Lincoln’s image in sculpture combines poetic description, human-interest anecdotes, and incisive analysis. James Percoco shows how the different styles of public art shed light on the changing memories of our greatest president. Each chapter alone is worth the price of this book.”

To find more books on Lincoln, visit our website.

The Politics of Promotion

FUPress — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 23:11:10 +0000

By Timothy J. Orr

*Photo 1

In the summer of 2006, as a member of the PHMC’s scholars-in-residence program, I spent a month in Harrisburg researching at the Pennsylvania State Archives. I spent time sifting through Record Group 19, the records of Pennsylvania’s adjutant general, examining Civil War commissions’ files.

*Photo 2

Early on, a particular set of correspondence captured my attention. I encountered a stack of letters related to the promotion of Lieutenant Colonel Gustavus Town. In 1862, Pennsylvania’s adjutant general had to answer a hefty stack of letters about Town’s promotion to colonel. As I read the ill-toned epistles, the reason for the controversy became obvious. A cluster of Union generals, all of them well-known Democrats, wanted to deny Town—a Republican—his promotion to colonel. Meanwhile, state politicians—all Republicans—insisted upon Town’s elevation. I expressed shock to learn that the promotion of a single junior officer could paralyze the functioning of Pennsylvania’s executive office for months, and I wondered what made Lieutenant Colonel Town’s case so special. But then, as I examined the commissions’ files for other Pennsylvania regiments, I noticed similar stacks of papers, all of them filled with vicious, petty squabbles over promotions. I must have examined over 100 Pennsylvania regiments that summer, and I had yet to find a single regiment that did not bicker like petty school children.

When I left Harrisburg, I wondered why Pennsylvanians were so quick to argue about promotions. Did something make them particularly factious? I kept this question in my pocket until the next summer, when I visited the state archives in Albany, New York. When examining the records of these adjutants-general, I noticed the same trend. Indeed, for four years, New York’s three adjutants-general answered volumes of letters from irate Union officers demanding promotion, usually on account of their partisan loyalty. After Albany, I visited more state archives and at each one I found the same kinds of letters. “Goodness,” I wondered, “what was wrong with the Union army?” No group of people in nineteenth-century America appeared more vindictive, more ruthless, more back-stabbing, and more ambitious than the junior officer corps of the Union army. Clearly, I had discovered a dysfunction of the Union army that had never appeared in the literature. What, though, should I make of this?

*Photo 3

My eyes opened when I presented my initial findings at the Society for Military History’s annual conference. Mark Neely, for whom This Distracted and Anarchical People honors, served as commentator. In his remarks, he announced, “Timothy Orr shows us that the typical Union regiment was as corrupt as the New York Customs House.” I let this sink in. Is that what I proved? The Union army was a crooked system founded on political spoils? As a military historian, such an idea seemed alarmingly contrarian. I understood that all modern officers derive their promotions through the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act of 1980, which set into place specific parameters that determined a person’s promotion eligibility and fitness. I always knew that in regards to command-fitness, Civil War officers lived in a pre-modern world, but until then—until Neely pointed it out to me—I never comprehended how different that world really was.

Later on, after the conference had ended, Neely offered me more advice, saying, “I see politics in everything. In fact, I borrow an idea from the historian Roy Franklin Nichols: the nineteenth-century suffered from ‘too much politics.’ Introduce a little Roy Franklin Nichols into your problem, and I think you’ll come up with an answer.”

Following Neely’s direction, I used political history to make sense of a military history problem. The result is my contribution to This Distracted and Anarchical People. I hope that readers might stand in awe of the subject as I do. Nowadays, we live in a world where the U.S. government takes strenuous precaution to elevate the most qualified officers to positions so they can lead our servicemen and servicewomen into battle competently. During the Civil War, no such system of meritocracy existed. From 1861-1865, state governments directed the course of promotions, using partisan loyalty unashamedly as the barometer for leadership in the U.S. Army.

Leadership is a fascinating thing, and I think it is an enlightening exercise to contrast the way Americans have defined the meaning of military leadership over the course of 150 years.
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Dr. Timothy J. Orr is Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University. He specializes in American Military History and History of the Civil War Era. In particular, he has written on Union mobilization and the lives of Union soldiers. His latest research focuses on partisan conflict within the officer corps of the Army of the Potomac and also upon U.S. Naval dive bombing during the Battle of Midway. Dr. Orr teaches courses on American Military History, American Naval History, Virginia History, and the History of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Captions for the photos:
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*Photo 1: The first image depicts King’s accuser, Arthur Harper Grimshaw (seated, center). In 1862, Grimshaw became colonel of the 4th Delaware Infantry. (In this photograph, Grimshaw is surrounded by his fellow officers.) The commissions’ files kept in the Delaware Public Archives reveal that Grimshaw never stopped intervening in matters of promotion. During the war, he deluged the office of Delaware’s Secretary of State (who assumed the duties of an adjutant general during a time of war) with opinionated letters, most of them aimed at elevating his Republican officers or denying promotions to the 4th Delaware’s Democrats. (Image courtesy of the Delaware Historical Society.)

*Photo 2: The second image depicts a segment of “Traitor in the Camp,” a broadside published by Arthur H. Grimshaw of Wilmington, Delaware. Grimshaw, a Republican, sent this broadside to New York’s Adjutant General, Thomas Hillhouse, with an aim to rescind the lieutenancy offered to Adam E. King, a Delaware Democrat who served in the 31st New York Infantry. Although Grimshaw’s effort to remove King represented an unusual amount of hateful obsession, by no means did it embody a rarity among the files of the adjutants-general in the Northern states. In every regiment, in every state, Republicans accused Democrats of promoting unworthy officers, and the Democrats accused the Republicans of playing political favoritism. (Image courtesy of the New York State Archives, Albany, New York.)

*Photo 3: The third image depicts Adam E. King, the subject of “Traitor in the Camp.” Although Arthur Grimshaw painted King as an inveterate secessionist, King’s fellow officers—the Democratic ones, only—vouched for his sterling character. Swayed by their plea, New York’s governor, Edwin Morgan, elected to keep King at his post. Eventually, King rose to the rank of brevet brigadier general, as seen here. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress).

Civil Rights in New York City

FUPress — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 09:10:09 +0000

Today marks the anniversary of Civil Rights Leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.

In 1967, King led the largest antiwar demonstration to date in New York City. More than 1,100 people marched with King from Central Park to U.N. headquarters to protest the Vietnam War.

He is remembered today in New York with a street named in his honor. Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard is an alternative name for Manhattan’s 125th Street. There is also a Martin Luther King, Jr. High School on Amsterdam Avenue and a Martin Luther King Triangle, a park space in Manhattan’s Mott Haven neighborhood (Austin Place and East 149th Street).

Since the 1960s, most U.S. history has been written as if the civil rights movement were primarily or entirely a Southern history. Civil Rights in New York City edited by Clarence Taylor joins a growing body of scholarship that demonstrates the importance of the Northern history of the movement. The contributors make clear that civil rights in New York City were contested in many ways, beginning long before the 1960s, and across many groups with a surprisingly wide range of political perspectives. Civil Rights in New York City provides a sample of the rich historical record of the fight for racial justice in the city that was home to the nation’s largest population of African-Americans in mid-twentieth century America.

Also of interest…

Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free
Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman and POW

For more information on Red Tails visit or www.Redtailsfilm.com.

Age-Old Media Bias

FUPress — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 21:06:50 +0000

By Matthew Isham
In the wake of the acrimonious presidential election this past fall, several political pundits condemned what they believed to be invidious media bias on both sides of the contest. That bias, they charged, has created a toxic political environment that exacerbates partisanship and sharply divides the nation. At Salon, for instance, Andrew Leonard blamed the conservative “echo chamber” for promoting Republican extremism and blinding the party’s loyal base to political reality. Not to be outdone, Rich Noyes at the Fox News website accused “media elites” in essence of conspiring to derail Romney’s campaign and re-elect the president. For Leonard, Noyes, and other pundits, the behavior of the media in recent elections offends their ideal of an independent and objective media, scrupulously devoid of political bias. Their complaints are inspired by a nostalgic notion that the country’s press once was a model of professional objectivity, but, with the proliferation of electronic media, in recent years has devolved into unseemly partisanship.

Yet, what these critics see as a troubling new phenomenon has a very long history in this country in reality. Historically, the proliferation of the press and the establishment of political parties were intimately intertwined. Each was necessary to the establishment and development of the other. Beginning around 1800, newspapers enabled incipient political parties to reach a national audience and recruit loyal voters, ensuring the organizations’ long-term survival. For their part, newspapers benefited from subsidies from political parties to publish campaign information and literature and from an expanded readership that devoured political news. Still, this mutually beneficial relationship did not always sit well with people. The well-known social reformer and critic Gerrit Smith despaired of the deepening partnership between the press and political parties in the 1820s. He cautioned citizens that if they cherished an independent press, then they should “expose it, as little as possible, to the corruption of political parties and to the lying spirit, which too generally actuates them.” Americans did not heed Smith’s warning, however, for unabashedly partisan newspapers came to dominate the press from the 1820s through the Civil War.

So why did Americans tolerate a thoroughly politicized and highly partisan press in the past? In large part it was because the concept of a professional, critical, and objective media was foreign to them. From the 18th through much of the 19th century, the American press was designed to serve a segmented market. Individual newspapers served the interests of merchants, lawyers, women, temperance advocates, abolitionists, churchgoers, devotees of literature, even enthusiasts of pornography, among other niche markets. Americans therefore were used to popular media that promoted and catered to particular points of view, interests and beliefs. In Objectivity and the News, the historian Daniel Schiller contends that the penny press of the 1830s essentially invented the concept of objectivity in the media when they sought to bypass the segmented market and create a broader public appeal. This was an inauspicious development, for these journals’ pose of objectivity was a mere marketing ploy, not an accurate reflection of their editorial or journalistic practice. The penny press still was highly politicized, if not consistently partisan.

Partisan newspapers continued to dominate the press until the late nineteenth century, when. overt partisanship in the media all but disappeared. Politics and the media nevertheless continue to be intimately connected, as the robust market for political news has remained a constant. The proliferation of electronic media in recent years, particularly with the success of special interest websites and blogs, has capitalized on this by resurrecting media partisanship. This might come as an unwelcome shock to those who venerate the myth of media objectivity, but it is unsurprising when considered in the context of the mutual historical development of the media and partisan politics in this country.
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Matthew Isham is Managing Director of The George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, The Pennsylvania State University. He wrote “A Press That Speaks Its Opinions Frankly and Openly and Fearlessly”: The Contentious Relationship between the Democratic Press and the Party in the Antebellum North in This Distracted and Anarchical People: New Answers for Old Questions about the Civil War–Era North.

Salon link
Fox News link

The New York Times on Heartbeats in the Muck

FUPress — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 19:59:48 +0000

“. . .Hurricane Sandy reminded New Yorkers that the waterways surrounding them can be a dire threat as well as a great asset. This is a good time to explore their history. John Waldman, a biology professor at Queens College, offers a brief and elegantly written tour in “Heartbeats in the Muck: The History, Sea Life and Environment of New York Harbor” (Fordham University Press, $18).

This updated edition was published before the storm struck, but as Mr. Waldman breezily chronicles the harbor’s ecological decline and rebirth over several centuries, he never underestimates the waters that in one way or another have always defined New York.

Also notable is a new volume edited by Mr. Waldman: “Still the Same Hawk: Reflections on Nature and New York” (Fordham University Press, $18), a collection of essays by writers including Phillip Lopate and Robert Sullivan.”

Read Sam Roberts’ entire column.

Why University Presses Matter

FUPress — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 07:27:50 +0000

We are excited to have Fordham University Press Director, Fredric Nachbaur, blogging for us as part of the University Press Week blog tour! The tour continues today at Texas A&M University Press. A complete blog tour schedule is also available here.

Witnessing all the damage caused by Sandy has me feeling a melancholy. I was born and raised in New Jersey and spent many summers “down the shore.” In recent summers I have taken my daughter to some of the same beaches I enjoyed as a kid. I’ve been a New Yorker since 1991 and am a regular visitor to Coney Island, and lived for a short time in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It is quite devastating to see all the massive destruction done to our great city and state and to our neighbors in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. As I was preparing to write my post for University Press Week, I reflected on how university presses have bonded together in the past during times of tragedy to help us all understand what is happening at the moment and how we can move forward. “Books for Understanding” was developed by the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) soon after 9/11 to bring the latest and most valuable scholarship to readers in an easy to find and easy to use place. The AAUP instantly became a resource for people who wanted to know more and to find it from reliable sources—University Presses—the pillars of knowledge. The day after hurricane Sandy hit, a reporter from the Huffington Post contacted me about a Fordham University Press (FUP) author who wrote a history of the NYC subways. She wanted to interview him about the flooding of the tunnels and the mass transit shutdown. It is a prime example of how the media turns to university presses for expertise during times of crisis.

We emphasize scholarship by being witnesses to global events, detectives for finding the best authors, and sharers of critical information that has been researched and vetted. Combining efforts to make all of our books on a specific topic of current concern to citizens of the world is invaluable. There are several lists related to Hurricane Sandy, including one on Katrina. Knowing this, I’m not feeling as sad. Thank you AAUP! In preparation for University Press Week to celebrate the AAUP turning 75, Will Underwood, Director of Kent State University Press, asked fellow directors to gather some endorsements from key stakeholders. Happily, I got a great response from faculty and administrators on the Fordham campus as well as some FUP authors and friends. Here is what the Provost of Fordham University wrote:

“As the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) celebrates its 75th anniversary, Fordham University joins in honoring a rich history of committed leadership and collaborative service to the academy and to society. Fordham University Press has partnered with AAUP since 1938 to advance academic excellence in the full pursuit of truth and to enrich public discourse through the dissemination of scholarly research of the highest quality across the disciplines. We look forward to our work with the AAUP to engage evolving challenges and opportunities for university presses in the decades ahead. —Stephen Freedman, Provost, Fordham University

FUP celebrated its 100^th anniversary in 2007. Established in 1907 to help Fordham faculty publish monographs based on their research, we now publish up to 70 books per year from faculty at institutions all over the globe. Not unlike the AAUP, FUP is a small organization with big ambitions. We have established ourselves as a leading academic press concentrating in history, literary theory, philosophy and religion. We also publish well established series in continental philosophy, American philosophy, medieval studies, World War II, and the Civil War among others and have created new series spanning a diversity of topics from Orthodox Christianity to Italian American studies. We have a long history publishing regional books focusing on New York City and the Hudson Valley. In 2010, we established the Empire State Editions imprint to better brand and market these titles.

To kick off the festivities of UP week, we hosted an open house for faculty showcasing their work as authors and series editors. Despite the previous evening’s nor’easter, we got a nice turnout and received positive feedback. Here are a few shots.

On Veteran’s Day, FUP hosted a Veteran’s Day public program entitled Five Historians Reflect on World War II: What We Know, What We Still Need to Learn and What We May Never Know. It turned out to be a successful event with a lively engaged audience. Here are some pics.

Dr. Scott H. Bennett, author of Army GI, Pacifist CO: The World War II Letters of Frank and Albert Dietrich

Dr. G. Kurt Piehler, Dr. Scott H. Bennett, Dr. Sidney Pash, Dr. Ann Pfau, Dr. John Chambers, Dr. J. Garry Clifford

FUP is lean, resourceful, hardworking, and determined. I’d say that about captures the definition of a university press and the AAUP. I’m proud to be a member of this superb, caring, humane community. Happy birthday AAUP. Here’s to another 75 years.

I’ll end with a quote from a friend and a fan of university presses:

“What words to describe the university press? Patient, ambitious, demanding, sustaining, generous, utterly essential. Serious thinking is unimaginable without it.”
—William Germano, Dean of Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union

Fredric Nachbaur (Twitter: @FNachbaur) is the Director of Fordham University Press.

Next stop: Texas A&M University Press.

How to Lose a Close Election

FUPress — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 14:13:13 +0000

A version of this first appeared on the blog With A Brooklyn Accent on October 22, 2012.

By Mark Naison, co-author of The Rat That Got Away (Fordham University Press).

Virtually every poll now has President Obama and Mitt Romney embroiled in an extremely close race. The president could very well win this election; but he could also lose. And if he does lose, I will have to go back to something I first started saying nearly three years — namely that turning off the nation’s teachers with educational policies which silence their voice and put them under extreme stress is not only bad for the nation’s schools, it could cripple the president’s re-election efforts.I have worked to get the president to incorporate the nation’s teachers into education policy discussions, and stop requiring schools to ratchet up the number of standardized tests to receive federal funding. I have privately engaged people close to the president in conversation about teachers’ disillusionment, efforts which were totally unsuccessful.The president’s inner circle, from what I could gather, refused to bend on support for Race to the Top and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. They were not only convinced that these policies would end up improving the nation’s schools; they felt that the political gains to be made in terms of support from wealthy donors and influential journalists was far greater than any losses that would occur in terms of teacher enthusiasm. They knew the largest teachers unions would support the president no matter what policies he chose to implement.

Now, at crunch time, when it’s too late to change course, I can tell you that this judgment was a severe miscalculation. Not only have the president’s policies failed to narrow testing gaps by race and class, they have contributed to teacher morale in the nation to be the lowest it has been since pollsters began measuring this trait.

But the political consequences may have been even more serious than the educational ones. Most teachers will probably end up voting for the president, but from what I have seen, in both New York and around the nation, they will not be manning phone banks, canvassing in their neighborhoods, traveling to swing states on the weekends and generally giving time, money and energy to assure the president’s election the way they did in 2008.

Many pundits attribute the Obama victory in 2008 to an incredibly strong “ground game” composed of huge numbers of volunteers, as well as paid staff, working to get out the vote in battleground states. Many of those individuals, including me, my wife, and many of my friends, were teachers, professors and school administrators. During this election, I know of few, if any educators putting in that kind of heroic effort, almost entirely because they are feeling betrayed by the president, indeed, by the entire Democratic Party, on educational issues, even though they support the president’s positions on reproductive freedom, gay rights, taxation and medical care.

There is no way of knowing whether the phenomenon I am describing is will be a “game changer” in this election. But based on what I have seen in 2008 and in this campaign, there is a chance it could be. And if it is, the Obama brain trust has no one to blame but themselves.

Mark Naison is co-author of The Rat That Got Away (Fordham University Press). He is professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University in New York and chairman of the department of African and African-American Studies. He is also co-director of the Urban Studies Program, African-American History 20th Century. A version of this first appeared on the blog With A Brooklyn Accent.

Antonio Masi Talks About His Work

FUPress — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:05:26 +0000

During a recent exhibition at the New York City Transit Museum, Antonio Masi was interviewed about his painting approach and ideas. Here is a link to the interview and a brief painting demo. Video Link

New York Golden Age of Bridges
Paintings by Antonio Masi
Essays by Joan Marans Dim

Visit www.antoniomasi.com to read more about Antonio Masi and his work.