HIDDEN HISTORIES
Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York from the Suppressed to the Strange offers a fresh look at 1920s New York City, unearthing stories of everyday life and marginalized communities. Sweeping events such as the Harlem Renaissance, Prohibition, and immigration reform are seen through the individual experiences of librarians, cops, shopkeepers, sexworkers, ragpickers, dogs, and antivaxxers that counter the era’s popular conceptions of ballooning wealth and uproarious celebration. Jonathan Ezra Goldman’s whirlwind tour of 1920s NYC visits an all-female police platoon, a Black amusement park shut down before it opened, an Arabic literary salon, socialist Puerto Rican cigar factories, Chinatown funerals, lesbian cafes, toxic dumps, and Ku Klux Klan recruitment offices. These stories still resonate today, testifying that this dizzying, exuberant ride through hidden history can help twenty-first readers see our own moment more clearly.
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Launch Events!
Come hear me read and talk, often in conversation with really brilliant people.
Playlist
Songs discussed in “Hidden History of Jazz Age New York from the Suppressed to the Strange"
Bibliography and notes
Complete list of sources and bibliographic information.
Errata
Unfortunately, proofreading oversights and editing errors crept in to the volume. Here is a running list.
Reviews
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"A fascinating and fact-filled look at Gotham in the Roaring Twenties."
— Kirkus Reviews
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"A closer look at a city defined not only by its celebrated moments, but also by the struggles and contributions that helped shape modern New York."
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" 'Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York' is chock full of fascinating tidbits and it both celebrates and questions the Jazz Age in New York City."
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"I’ve been eagerly awaiting an account of the creepy parallels between early 20th century America and today. Jonathan Ezra Goldman’s Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York: From the Suppressed to the Strange exuberantly does the job. His rollercoaster ride through New York City cultural history, focusing especially on the years 1920 through 1925, highlights how ‘then’ often looks like a funhouse mirror reflection of ‘now’ ... Over the course of 23 engaging and wide-ranging chapters, he makes the unseen visible, using yesterday’s newspapers and today’s scholarship to sketch out less well known New York contingents... The book’s superpower is the velocity of its prose. This is a paperback you can take to the beach and entertain or annoy your companions with your discoveries.”
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"A compelling narrative chronicling a transformative decade in New York City's history—one whose themes still resonate a century later. You’ll read about the eccentric health obsessions of millionaire businessmen, the audacity of women performers challenging social taboos, the rise of nativist movements, and the fervent debates surrounding women's rights and immigration reform, technological innovations that revolutionized music consumption and the emergence of the cult of personality. What's old is most definitely new again! Goldman's vignettes juxtapose the glittering lives of celebrities with poignant accounts of lost loves and failed enterprises among ordinary citizens—individuals whose contributions helped shape the City's singular and resplendent cultural identity."
— Elena Martínez, Folklorist, City Lore/Bronx Music Heritage Center
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"Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York is that rare work of history that is both eminently scholarly—a nearly encyclopedic look at 1920s New York—and enchantingly readable. Goldman brings to vivid life figures, moments, and movements that have for too long been ignored. The book looks backward to look forward; that is, it helps us to understand how we got to where we are now. In particular, Jonathan Goldman explores the lives of figures who have, because of their race, gender, sexuality, or immigration status, been sidelined in our history books as much (or more) than they were in their own time. A fantastic work of engaged scholarship."
— Hugh Ryan, author of When Brooklyn Was Queer
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Jonathan Ezra Goldman has amassed a tremendous amount of information about New York City in the 1920s, mostly the early years of the decade. The volume is a grab bag of material, some entries short, some several pages long, grouped by class, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. In particular, the author goes deeply into the role of women, Native people, and African Americans, probing the Marcus Garvey movement in detail. Among the topics are the health obsessions of millionaires, women performers challenging social taboos, the rise of nativist movements, debates surrounding women’s rights and immigration reform, technological innovations that revolutionized music consumption, and the emergence of the cult of personality. Goldman tells us who owned the NYC nightclubs, who went there, and who got into trouble.
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"In Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York, Jonathan Ezra Goldman takes readers on a wild ride through New York City during the 1920s Jazz Age. Goldman challenges the reliance upon a familiar, singular narrative of this period (or any period, for that matter). Viewing daily life through multiple lenses across lines of class, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity provides readers with the opportunity to understand better the range of human experiences and the complexity of urban politics and society."
— Shirley J. Yee, author of An Immigrant Neighborhood: Interethnic and Interracial Encounters in New York before 1930
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"Jonathan Goldman's Hidden Histories is a wonder and a delight—a lyrical and surprising historical excavation of Jazz Age New York that had me riveted from page one. You will find plenty of familiar figures (Dorothy Parker, Babe Ruth) between these covers, but even more exciting are the unfamiliar ones. This book deserves a prominent place on any shelf of enduring works of New York City history."
— Jonathan Mahler, author of The Gods of New York
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"[Hidden Histories]" weaves a rich tapestry of all the diverse communities and cultures in New York and all the things they were doing culturally and politically. You really get a great feeling of what a rich, vibrant city New York was and how so much of those strains of fighting for the community over the big corporation are built into its history. "