New York City: Harboring World Cultures and Commerce

New York City’s diverse, resilient people and its commercial prowess focus this chapter. Explorers describe early contact: food and furs offered as trade, and native practices including seasonal migration. The Dutch East India Company commercialized trade, its forts becoming settlements. Europeans introduced their animals, crops, and modes of cultivation. The African Burial Ground National Monument preserves stories of enslaved laborers. Washington Irving satirizes the Dutch settlement and its moral compromises. British, German, Scottish, French Huguenot, Jewish, and free African Americans joined the Dutch. Following Manhattan’s British occupation during the Revolutionary War, Alexander Hamilton promotes its development as a commercial hub. Charles Dickens reports on environmental deterioration in slums such as Five Points. Walt Whitman celebrates the diversity of New Yorkers, its growing skyline and shipping. Creation of Central Park responds to the lack of green space in the growing city. Hart Crane and Marianne Moore represent culturally vital Greenwich Village, while Harlem resonates in the writing of James Weldon Johnson, Paule Marshal, Bruce Nugent, and Toni Morrison. We follow the rise and fall of skyscrapers from plans for the Neo-Gothic Woolworth building to the aftermath of the 9/11 in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.