Chronicles the sweeping history of the storied Henry Street Settlement and its enduring vision of a more just society On a cold March day in 1893, 26-year-old nurse Lillian Wald rushed through the poverty-stricken streets of New York's Lower East Side to a squalid bedroom where a young mother lay dying--abandoned by her doctor because she could not pay his fee. The misery in the room and the walk to reach it inspired Wald to establish Henry Street Settlement, which would become one of the most influential social welfare organizations in American history. Through personal narratives, vivid images, and previously untold stories, Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier chronicles Henry Street's sweeping history from 1893 to today. From the fights for public health and immigrants' rights that fueled its founding, to advocating for relief during the Great Depression, all the way to tackling homelessness and AIDS in the 1980s, and into today--Henry Street has been a champion for social justice. Its powerful narrative illuminates larger stories about poverty, and who is "worthy" of help; immigration and migration, and who is welcomed; human rights, and whose voice is heard. For over 125 years, Henry Street Settlement has survived in a changing city and nation because of its ability to change with the times; because of the ingenuity of its guiding principle--that by bridging divides of class, culture, and race we could create a more equitable world; and because of the persistence of poverty, racism, and income disparity that it has pledged to confront. This makes the story of Henry Street as relevant today as it was more than a century ago. The House on Henry Street is not just about the challenges of overcoming hardship, but about the best possibilities of urban life and the hope and ambition it takes to achieve them.

The House on Henry Street: The Enduring Life of a Lower East Side Settlement (Washington Mews Books, 7)

History

Snyder-Grenier, Ellen M.

Americas

Washington Mews Books/NYU Press

A vivid memoir of life in one of New York City's most dynamic neighborhoods Growing Up Bank Street is an evocative, tender account of life in Greenwich Village, on a unique street that offered warmth, support, and inspiration to an adventurous and openhearted young girl. Bank Street, a short strip of elegant brownstones and humble tenements in Greenwich Village, can trace its lineage back to the yellow fever epidemics of colonial New York. In the middle of the last century, it became home to a cast of extraordinary characters whose stories intertwine in this spirited narrative. Growing up, Donna Florio had flamboyant, opera performer parents and even more free-spirited neighbors. As a child, she lived among beatniks, artists, rock musicians, social visionaries, movie stars, and gritty blue-collar workers, who imparted to her their irrepressibly eccentric life rules. The real-life Auntie Mame taught her that she is a divine flame from the universe. John Lennon, who lived down the street, was gracious when she dumped water on his head. Sex Pistols star Sid Vicious lived in the apartment next door, and his heroin overdose death came as a wake-up call during her wild twenties. An elderly Broadway dancer led by brave example as Donna helped him comfort dying Villagers in the terrifying early days of AIDS, and a reclusive writer gave her a path back from the brink when, as a witness to the attacks of 9/11, her world collapsed. These vibrant vignettes weave together a colorful coming of age tale against the backdrop of a historic, iconoclastic street whose residents have been at the heart of the American story. As Greenwich Village gentrifies and the hallmarks of its colorful past disappear, Growing Up Bank Street gives the reader a captivating glimpse of the thriving culture that once filled its storied streets.

Growing Up Bank Street: A Greenwich Village Memoir (Washington Mews Books, 10)

Florio, Donna

Historical Study & Educational Resources

Follows centuries of New York activism to reveal the city as a globally influential machine for social change Activist New York surveys New York City’s long history of social activism from the 1650’s to the 2010’s. Bringing these passionate histories alive, Activist New York is a visual exploration of these movements, serving as a companion book to the highly-praised Museum of the City of New York exhibition of the same name. New York’s primacy as a metropolis of commerce, finance, industry, media, and ethnic diversity has given it a unique and powerfully influential role in the history of American and global activism. Steven H. Jaffe explores how New York’s evolving identities as an incubator and battleground for activists have made it a “machine for change.” In responding to the city as a site of slavery, immigrant entry, labor conflicts, and wealth disparity, New Yorkers have repeatedly challenged the status quo. Activist New York brings to life the characters who make up these vibrant histories, including David Ruggles, an African American shopkeeper who helped enslaved fugitives on the city’s Underground Railroad during the 1830s; Clara Lemlich, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who helped spark the 1909 “Uprising of 20,000” that forever changed labor relations in the city’s booming garment industry; and Craig Rodwell, Karla Jay, and others who forged a Gay Liberation movement both before and after the Stonewall Riot of June 1969. The city’s inhabitants have been at the forefront of social change on issues ranging from religious tolerance and minority civil rights to sexual orientation and economic justice. Across 16 lavishly illustrated chronological chapters focusing on specific historical episodes, Jaffe explores how New York and New Yorkers have changed the way Americans think, feel, and act.

Activist New York: A History of People, Protest, and Politics (Washington Mews Books)

Jaffe, Steven H.

Product Description 
A delightful romp through America’s Golden Age of CocktailsThe decades following the American Civil War burst with invention―they saw the dawn of the telephone, the motor car, electric lights, the airplane―but no innovation was more welcome than the beverage heralded as the “cocktail.” The Gilded Age, as it came to be known, was the Golden Age of Cocktails, giving birth to the classic Manhattan and martini that can be ordered at any bar to this day. Scores of whiskey drinks, cooled with ice chips or cubes that chimed against the glass, proved doubly pleasing when mixed, shaken, or stirred with special flavorings, juices, and fruits. The dazzling new drinks flourished coast to coast at sporting events, luncheons, and balls, on ocean liners and yachts, in barrooms, summer resorts, hotels, railroad train club cars, and private homes.From New York to San Francisco, celebrity bartenders rose to fame, inventing drinks for exclusive universities and exotic locales. Bartenders poured their liquid secrets for dancing girls and such industry tycoons as the newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst and the railroad king “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt.Cecelia Tichi offers a tour of the cocktail hours of the Gilded Age, in which industry, innovation, and progress all take a break to enjoy the signature beverage of the age. Gilded Age Cocktails reveals the fascinating history behind each drink as well as bartenders’ formerly secret recipes. Though the Gilded Age cocktail went “underground” during the Prohibition era, it launched the first of many generations whose palates thrilled to a panoply of artistically mixed drinks. 
 Review 
"A powerful shot of history, aesthetics, identity, and politics, this elegant volume chronicles the early libations of America’s most profoundly elitist hours―cocktail time in the Gilded Age. Tichi provides new (and tasty) insight into the lives and art of bartenders who labored to provide pleasure for a decadent citizenry." -- Alice Randall, author of Black Bottom Saints\n"This delightful and insightful tour of America’s long affair with cocktails could not be more welcome. With a sure hand and a light touch, Tichi guides the reader back into the Gilded Age to know Americans by what they drank―where, when, with whom, and why. This elegant cultural history of taste―literal and social―is rich with details, recipes, and little-known facts: a journey backwards that lands us in the present, gifting us both self-awareness and escape." -- Carla Kaplan, author of Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance\n"If you’ve ever wondered how historical nonfiction can be dry like a martini and not dry like a textbook tome, you need to pick up Cecelia Tichi’s 
Gilded Age Cocktails. Tichi brings to glittering life what it meant to drink from 1870-1910. Chock full of quotes from primary sources of the day with titles like 1890’s Society as I Have Found It, Tichi makes clear how much lubrication kept this period of history afloat, prior to the double blow of a first World War and Prohibition." ― 
California Review of Books 
 About the Author 
Cecelia Tichi is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of nine books, including 
Jazz Age Cocktails (NYU Press, 2021), 
Gilded Age Cocktails (NYU Press, 2021), 
What Would Mrs. Astor Do? The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age (NYU Press, 2018) and 
Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (UNC Press, 2011).

Gilded Age Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from America's Golden Age (Washington Mews Books)

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Tichi, Cecelia

Beverages & Wine

Explores Jackie Robinson's compelling and complicated legacy Before the United States Supreme Court ruled against segregation in public schools, and before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, Jackie Robinson walked onto the diamond on April 15, 1947, as first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers, making history as the first African American to integrate Major League Baseball in the twentieth century. Today a national icon, Robinson was a complicated man who navigated an even more complicated world that both celebrated and despised him. Many are familiar with Robinson as a baseball hero. Few, however, know of the inner turmoil that came with his historic status. Featuring piercing essays from a range of distinguished sportswriters, cultural critics, and scholars, this book explores Robinson's perspectives and legacies on civil rights, sports, faith, youth, and nonviolence, while providing rare glimpses into the struggles and strength of one of the nation's most athletically gifted and politically significant citizens. Featuring a foreword by celebrated directors and producers Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, this volume recasts Jackie Robinson's legacy and establishes how he set a precedent for future civil rights activism, from Black Lives Matter to Colin Kaepernick.

42 Today: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (Washington Mews Books, 9)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

New York City’s elite women who turned a feminist cause into a fashionable revolution    In the early twentieth century over two hundred of New York's most glamorous socialites joined the suffrage movement. Their names—Astor, Belmont, Rockefeller, Tiffany, Vanderbilt, Whitney and the like—carried enormous public value. These women were the media darlings of their day because of the extravagance of their costume balls and the opulence of the French couture clothes, and they leveraged their social celebrity for political power, turning women's right to vote into a fashionable cause.   Although they were dismissed by critics as bored socialites “trying on suffrage as they might the latest couture designs from Paris,” these gilded suffragists were at the epicenter of the great reforms known collectively as the Progressive Era.  From championing education for women, to pursuing careers, and advocating for the end of marriage, these women were engaged with the swirl of change that swept through the streets of New York City.    Johanna Neuman restores these women to their rightful place in the story of women’s suffrage.  Understanding the need for popular approval for any social change, these socialites used their wealth, power, social connections and style to excite mainstream interest and to diffuse resistance to the cause.  In the end, as Neuman says, when change was in the air, these women helped push women’s suffrage over the finish line.  

Gilded Suffragists (Washington Mews Books)

NEUMAN

Cecil Dreeme is one of the queerest American novels of the 19th century. This edition, which includes a new introduction contextualizing the sexual history of the period and queer longings of the book, brings a rare, almost forgotten, sensational gothic novel set in New York’s West Village back to light.    Published posthumously in 1861, the novel centers on Robert Byng, a young man who moves back to New York after traveling abroad and finds himself unmarried and underemployed, adrift in the heathenish dens of lower Manhattan.  When he takes up rooms in “Chrysalis College”—a thinly veiled version of the 19th-century New York University building in Washington Square—he quickly finds himself infatuated with a young painter lodging there, named Cecil Dreeme. As their friendship grows and the novel unfolds against the backdrop of the bohemian West Village, Robert confesses that he “loves Cecil with a love passing the love of women.” Yet, there are dark forces at work in the form of the sinister and magnetic Densdeth, a charismatic figure of bad intention, who seeks to ensnare Robert for his own. Full of romantic entanglements, mistaken identity, blackmail, and the dramas of temptation and submission, Cecil Dreeme is a gothic novel at its finest. Poetically written—with flashes of Walt Whitman, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde— Cecil Dreeme is an early example of that rare bird, a queer novel from the 19th century.  

Cecil Dreeme: A Novel (Washington Mews Books, 1)

Literature & Fiction

Winthrop, Theodore

United States

Product Description 
How the Prohibition law of 1920 made alcohol, savored in secret, all the more delectable when the cocktail shaker was forced to go “underground”“Roaring Twenties” America boasted famous firsts: women’s right to vote, jazz music, talking motion pictures, flapper fashions, and wondrous new devices like the safety razor and the electric vacuum cleaner. The privations of the Great War were over, and Wall Street boomed. The decade opened, nonetheless, with a shock when Prohibition became the law of the land on Friday, January 16, 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment banned “intoxicating liquors.” Decades-long campaigns to demonize alcoholic beverages finally became law, and America officially went “dry.”American ingenuity promptly rose to its newest challenge. The law, riddled with loopholes, let the 1920s write a new chapter in the nation’s saga of spirits. Men and women spoke knowingly of the speakeasy, the bootlegger, rum-running, black ships, blind pigs, gin mills, and gallon stills. Passwords (“Oscar sent me”) gave entrée to night spots and supper clubs where cocktails abounded, and bartenders became alchemists of timely new drinks like the Making Whoopee, the Petting Party, the Dance the Charleston. A new social event―the cocktail party staged in a private home―smashed the gender barrier that had long forbidden “ladies” from entering into the gentlemen-only barrooms and cafés. From the author of Gilded Age Cocktails, this book takes a delightful new romp through the cocktail creations of the early twentieth century, transporting readers into the glitz and (illicit) glamour of the 1920s. Spirited and richly illustrated, Jazz Age Cocktails dazzles with tales of temptation and temperance, and features charming cocktail recipes from the time to be recreated and enjoyed. 
 Review 
"Cecilia Tichi’s lively, engaging history will find an enthusiastic audience. It’s fun to relate the rum-runners of the era, the movie stars, flappers, jazz musicians, writers, and just ordinary folk to the drinks they consumed. Our glass is raised to 
Jazz Age Cocktails!" -- Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, authors of America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking\n" 
Jazz Age Cocktails is a vivacious, accessible history of drinking and popular culture during Prohibition era America. Cecelia Tichi writes with enthusiasm and authority about this heady time, and her work is as easy to savor as a Champagne Julep. Its chapters cover aspects of Jazz Age society, including automobiles and airplanes; the gaudy, violent rise of organized crime; and the explosion of slang, games, and stunts. Vintage cocktail recipes conclude each section―most of them unfamilliar, wild concoctions that are spiked with unusual ingredients … Jazz Age Cocktails is a fun, illuminating look at an unusual decade that will appeal to cookbook and cocktail mavens who like their recipes with a history chaser." ― 
Foreword Reviews 
 About the Author 
Cecelia Tichi is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of nine books, including 
Jazz Age Cocktails (NYU Press, 2021), 
Gilded Age Cocktails (NYU Press, 2021), 
What Would Mrs. Astor Do? The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age (NYU Press, 2018) and 
Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (UNC Press, 2011).

Jazz Age Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from America's Roaring Twenties (Washington Mews Books)

An extraordinarily visceral collection of posters that represent the progressive protest movements of the twentieth Century. Two of the most recognizable images of twentieth-century art are Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” and the rather modest mass-produced poster by an unassuming illustrator, Lorraine Schneider “War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.” From Picasso’s masterpiece to a humble piece of poster art, artists have used their talents to express dissent and to protest against injustice and immorality. As the face of many political movements, posters are essential for fueling recruitment, spreading propaganda, and sustaining morale. Disseminated by governments, political parties, labor unions and other organizations, political posters transcend time and span the entire spectrum of political affiliations and philosophies. Drawing on the celebrated collection in the Tamiment Library’s Poster and Broadside Collection at New York University, Ralph Young has compiled an extraordinarily visceral collection of posters that represent the progressive protest movements of the twentieth Century: labor, civil rights, the Vietnam War, LGBT rights, feminism and other minority rights. Make Art Not War can be enjoyed on aesthetic grounds alone, and also offers fascinating and revealing insights into twentieth century cultural, social and political history.

Make Art Not War: Political Protest Posters from the Twentieth Century (Washington Mews Books)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Review\n"An original and deeply researched book that challenges many of the myths distorting our understanding of organized crime in the twentieth century. Paul Moses gracefully conjures the gritty world of Italian policemen, the struggles of the immigrant community they served, the complex realities of NYPD politics, and the formation of a transnational underworld stretching from New York to Sicily." -- Daniel Czitrom, author of New York Exposed\n"A thoughtful, enlightening, deeply researched exploration of the origins of organized crime in the United States. Moses brings to light the real-life origins of the Mafia and the attempts of Italian-American members of the NYPD to bring it to heel. The issues of ethnicity and criminality that Moses addresses are as timely today as they were a century ago. The Italian Squad is anengrossing read from first page to last." -- Peter Quinn, mystery writer, historian, and author of Banished Children of Eve: A Novel of Civil War New York\n"In this absorbing tale of a New York City plagued by bombings, blackmail, and child kidnappings, the unsung heroes of The Italian Squad battle ruthless Black Hand thugs as well as fierce Italian-American prejudice. Moses skillfully tells the little known story of how a group of undercover cops risked their lives to help a vulnerable Italian immigrant population grow and thrive." -- Maria Laurino, author of The Italian Americans: A History\n"In this impeccably researched book, Paul Moses does a masterful job bringing to life the brave men on the front lines of what was a new era in law enforcement. The Italian Squad is a must read for any student of history and organized crime." -- Matt Birkbeck, author of The Life We Chose and The Quiet Don\n"Moses shows how the Italian Squad was one of the first examples of community policing. With a reporter’s eye for detail and a writer’s feel for the sweep of history, Moses brings to life not only Petrosino, martyred during an investigation in Italy, but those many men and women who continued his fight for law and order for nearly two decades." -- Helene Stapinski, author of Murder in Matera\nThe unknown inside story of the NYPD’s Italian-born detectives who fought both powerful gangsters and the deeply ingrained prejudice against their own beloved immigrant community\nThe story begins in Sicily, on Friday, March 12, 1909, at 8:45 p.m. Three gunshots thundered in the night, and then a fourth. Two men fled, and investigators soon discovered who they had killed: Giuseppe Petrosino, the legendary American detective whose exploits in New York were celebrated even in Italy.\nThe Italian Squad, by veteran New York City journalist and historian Paul Moses, explores the lives of the nationally celebrated detectives who followed in the slain Petrosino’s footsteps as leaders of the New York City investigative squad: Anthony Vachris, Charles Corrao, and Michael Fiaschetti. Drawing on new primary sources such as private diaries and city, state, and federal documents, this dramatic narrative history follows the Italian Squad across the first two decades of the twentieth century as its detectives battled increasingly powerful gangsters, political obstacles and deeply ingrained prejudice against their own beloved Italian immigrant community.\nVachris, Corrao, and Fiaschetti became, like Petrosino, famous for meting out tough justice to criminals who comprised the “Black Hand.” Beyond trying to prevent horrific crimes―nighttime bombings in crowded tenements, kidnappings that targeted children at play, gangland shootings that killed innocent bystanders―the Italian Squad commanders hoped to persuade society of what they knew for themselves: that their fellow immigrant Italians, so often maligned, would make good American citizens.\nIn this explosive story, Moses carefully strips away the mythology that has always enveloped the Italian Squad and offers instead a nuanced portrait of brave but flawed men who fought th

The Italian Squad: The True Story of the Immigrant Cops Who Fought the Rise of the Mafia

Politics & Social Sciences

Moses, Paul

Social Sciences

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Washington Mews Books/NYU Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Washington Mews Books/NYU Press