New York: An Illustrated History of the People

By Allon Schoener

Book Overview

According to the 1990 census, New York, for the first time in a century, had more foreign-born inhabitants than native-born residents. A city of continual immigration, New York's people have been documented by major artists and photographers from the earliest European settlers to the present. In this majestic illustrated history, with over 500 prints, paintings, and photographs, many never before published, we see the arrival of the first wave of Dutch and Anglo-Saxon settlers in the seventeenth century. We progress through Irish and German immigrations in the mid-nineteenth century, the immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of vast numbers of Italians and Eastern European Jews as well as Greeks and Slavs, followed by African Americans moving from the South after World War I. Finally, as the twentieth century comes to a close, Caribbeans, Latinos, Africans, and Asians have become the dominant new New Yorkers. As he did with Harlem on My Mind, The Lower East Side, American Jewish Album, and The Italian Americans, Allon Schoener has brought together wonderful images as well as documentary accounts from diaries, letters, news articles, and other sources, giving us the rich history and texture of this great city.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393045811
• ISBN13: 9780393045819
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 5.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 11.4" x 10.3"

Customer Reviews

A coffee table book par excellence

New York : An Illustrated History is a lively, informative book that tells the city's history from a unique perspective. Allon Schoener, a social historian, traces the waves of immigration to New York over the last four centuries and tells their story using photographs, letters, newspapers, and paintings. The reader feels a sense of immediacy as well as understanding as he learns about each ethnic group and their impact on the city. In the end it is the story of all New Yorkers and how they have made and continue to make the city great. The story is well-researched and clearly told with great insight. It is obviously the work of someone who loves New York. Mr.Schoener's text is matched by his brilliant choice of photographs. New York: An Illustrated History is clearly a coffee table book par excellence which will be read over and over again.