Milstein Division

In my last post a few weeks ago I wrote of the history of rioting and protesting in Tompkins Square Park. New York has always been a riotous city, where citizens have time and time again taken to the streets to demonstrate, strike and protest. Over the centuries the nature and character of these events has evolved, as has the reaction of the general public and the police to these group manifestations of displeasure. The subject of popular disorder and collective action or violence tends to be a fairly popular topic among researchers at the library and I’ve found that studying riots and strikes in New York provides a great way to gauge the social and economic climate of the city at different points in time.

Early on in the city’s history, from colonial times up until the first decade of the 19th century, rioting in New York was generally an accepted part of the city’s political culture, a legacy of English tradition. Many scholars who have written on the history of public protest in early America note that prior to the 1830s, most of the protests and more violent riots were of two kinds; either they were of a distinctly political nature, such as the post-revolutionary Anti-Federalist riots, or they were aimed at enforcing community standards and widely held moral values, such as the Doctors’ Riots in 1788 or the bawdy house raids of 1793 and 1799.  read more »

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the protest in Tompkins Square Park that devolved into a 5-hour long clash between police, East Village residents and other park habitués. The day following the riots the New York Post dubbed the incident "Night of Rage" while the Daily News ran with "Tompkins Park Fury." However, there wasn’t just one violent confrontation to be remembered. Rather there were a series of demonstrations and pitched protests during the eighties and early nineties between older residents, newcomers to the neighborhood, the police, neighborhood squatters, and the younger crowd that frequented the park and surrounding streets.

The protests and clashes of late July and early August 1988 were alternatively described in the newspapers as being a result of a newly instated 1 A.M. park curfew, the influx of homeless camped out there, the noise of the crowds that gathered in the park to play music and hang out, and the overarching dispute over housing and perceived gentrification of the neighborhood. These were the years when “Die Yuppie Scum” seemed a valid and meaningful protest chant and graffiti often expressed other anarchist desires and pipe dreams. What drove the August 6th anti-curfew protest over the edge was not only the rowdy and violent behavior of some of the protesters that night, but the extreme reaction of the police force to the protest.  read more »

Everyday here in the Milstein Division, we get questions from all over the city and around the country about the history of New York City. Questions range from the very specific, “What was the weather in Manhattan on May 7th 1864?” to the dauntingly vague, “My great-grandfather lived in New York, his name was Patrick Murphy. Could you send me information on him?” Fortunately, the library’s collection of reference material on New York City history is astounding and rare is the question that goes unanswered. But for those who don’t have direct access to our print collection and are interested in researching the history of our great metropolis, I invite you to a free research class at the library this week.  read more »

Last week, while doing some research on abolitionism in one of our best historical newspaper databases, I came across some references to organizations called Free Produce Societies. As I had previously never come across these groups, I decided to do some further research. Free Produce Associations were formed in the early decades of the 19th century by radical abolitionists, generally Quakers and free blacks, who hoped to disengage themselves from participating in a culture they found to be both un-Christian and un-American. Through these societies they ran stores and markets in which they tried to pool their resources and their skills in order to offer for sale only products of free, i.e. not slave, labor. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a popular or respected activity and most of the time their very existence was looked upon with hostility by most of society. These groups tried to accomplish a nearly impossible task given how much America at the time relied on the enslaved populace for many of their consumer goods.

Right after I started reading about these associations, most notably the societies formed in Philadelphia, I read two back to back posts on the Hand-made blog which I found to be a pleasant reminder of historical continuity and of recurring movements in our nation’s record. I began to think about other times in United States history when individuals have gotten together to form an alternative to the mainstream marketplace, a place where an individual’s commitment to an ideal would not be compromised. Granted, the Free Produce Societies did not have an easy go of it considering the low opinion most people had of abolitionists during the 1840s, but they did try to make it work for quite a long time.

The database I mentioned earlier, The American Periodical Series, contains over 1,000 periodicals and newspapers and it includes two of the earliest and most radical abolitionist papers in the United States, Benjamin Lundy's The Genius of Universal Emancipation and William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator. Both of these papers are great for primary source research on abolitionism.