Your Voice Counts: Why Voting Matters Book List
Each year, New Yorkers have the opportunity to make a real difference in their communities by heading to the polls to choose leaders for a variety of important positions in government. It is so important that New Yorkers participate and make sure their voices are heard.
Libraries, since their inception, have given the public the tools they need to be active participants in our democracy, and this year is no different. In addition to information about voting, we've created a list of books about the history of New York City politics and how citizens have made a great impact over time. Read, learn, and vote!
Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City
by Carla L. Petersen
Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative, Black Gotham is Carla Peterson's riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbors, and business associates, she illuminates the greater history of African-American elites in New York City.
Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State
by Sam Stein
Our cities are changing. Around the world, more and more money is being invested in buildings and land. Real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, worth thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It forms sixty percent of global assets. Samuel Stein shows that this explosive transformation of urban life and politics has been driven not only by the tastes of wealthy newcomers, but by the state-driven process of urban planning. Planning agencies provide a unique window into the ways the state uses and is used by capital, and the means by which urban renovations are translated into rising real estate values and rising rents.
The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts
by Colson Whitehead
A masterful evocation of the city that never sleeps, The Colossus of New York captures the city’s inner and outer landscapes in a series of vignettes, meditations, and personal memories. Colson Whitehead conveys with almost uncanny immediacy the feelings and thoughts of longtime residents and of newcomers who dream of making it their home; of those who have conquered its challenges; and of those who struggle against its cruelties.
A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn
by Craig Steven Wilder
Spanning three centuries of Brooklyn history from the colonial period to the present, A Covenant with Color exposes the intricate relations of dominance and subordination that have long characterized the relative social positions of white and black Brooklynites.
Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn
by Brian Purnell
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) established a reputation as one of the most important civil rights organizations of the early 1960s. In the wake of the southern student sit-ins, CORE created new chapters all over the country, including one in Brooklyn, New York, which quickly established itself as one of the most audacious and dynamic chapters in the nation. In Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings, historian Brian Purnell explores the chapter's numerous direct-action protest campaigns for economic justice and social equality.
Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City
by Clarence Taylor
Fight the Power examines the explosive history of police brutality in New York City and the black community’s long struggle to resist it. Taylor brings this story to life by exploring the institutions and the people that waged campaigns to end the mistreatment of people of color at the hands of the police, including the black church, the black press, black communists and civil rights activists. Ranging from the 1940s to the mayoralty of Bill de Blasio, Taylor describes the significant strides made in curbing police power in New York City, describing the grassroots street campaigns as well as the accomplishments achieved in the political arena and in the city’s courtrooms.
Five Points: The 19th-century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum
by Tyler Anbinder
Drawing from letters, diaries, newspapers, bank records, police reports, and archaeological digs, Anbinder has written the first-ever history of Five Points, the neighborhood that was a microcosm of the American immigrant experience. The story that Anbinder tells is the classic tale of America’s immigrant past, as successive waves of new arrivals fought for survival in a land that was as exciting as it was dangerous, as riotous as it was culturally rich.
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898
by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace
The first volume in a monumental, swiftly moving, illustrated history of New York City--the product of twenty years' worth of research--leads readers from the region's Indian tribes to the birth of the skyscraper.
Harlem Between Heaven and Hell
by Monique M. Taylor
Harlem is used as an "emblem" of black progress in this candid study that takes a hard look at race, class, and gentrification among African Americans.
The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York
by Suleiman Osman
Considered one of the city's most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman offers a groundbreaking history of this unexpected transformation. Challenging the conventional wisdom that New York City's renaissance started in the 1990s, Osman locates the origins of gentrification in Brooklyn in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped the World
by Russell Shorto
A history of the Dutch role in the establishment of Manhattan discusses the rivalry between England and the Dutch Republic, focusing on the power struggle between Holland governor Peter Stuyvesant and politician Adriaen van der Donck that shaped New York's culture and social freedoms.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City
by Jonathan Mahler
These braided stories tell the history of a year that saw the opening of Studio 54, the evolution of punk rock, and the dawning of modern SoHo. As the pragmatist Koch defeated the visionary Cuomo and as Reggie Jackson finally rescued a team racked with dissension,1977 became a year of survival but also of hope.
New York City Politics: Governing Gotham
by Bruce F. Berg
This book analyzes how economic/fiscal, intergovernmental, and social forces impact the governance of New York City, focusing on the maintenance of democratic accountability and civil harmony and the delivery of public goods and services. It considers the city’s economic development; the role of state-city and federal government-city relations; the impact of racial and ethnic diversity; and the role of political parties, the charter, the mayor, other elected officials, the city council, and the municipal bureaucracy.
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
by Robert A. Caro
A modern American classic, this huge and galvanizing biography of Robert Moses reveals not only the saga of one man’s incredible accumulation of power but the story of his shaping (and misshaping) of twentieth-century New York.
To Be Mayor of New York: Ethnic Politics in the City
by Chris McNickle
McNickle then examines mayoral campaigns between 1945, the end of the LaGuardia era, and 1989, during which the Irish receded and Jews and later African-Americans emerged as the most important ethnic groups in local politics. To Be Mayor of New York offers the most complete study of the development of Jewish political participation in New York. Placing a rise of the New York City Reform Movement in historical perspective, the author explains the election of New York's first Jewish mayor, Abe Beame, and the first African-American mayor, David Dinkins, as part of the political evolution of both these groups.
Learn more about the resources you need to be an informed voter, what to expect in the upcoming election season, and find events about using your voice with the Library's Voter Information resources.
NYPL's Voter Engagement Initiative is made possible by the GoVoteNYC Fund in The New York Community Trust, Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge, Antoinette Delruelle and Joshua L. Steiner, and the Rattner Family Foundation.