Urban History

Buried Beneath the City

An Archaeological History of New York Nan A. Rothschild, Amanda Sutphin, H. Arthur Bankoff, and Jessica Striebel MacLean

Buried Beneath the City uses urban archaeology to retell the history of New York, from the deeper layers of the past to the topsoil of recent history. The book explores the ever-evolving city and the day-to-day world of its residents through artifacts, from the first traces of indigenous societies more than ten thousand years ago to the detritus of Dutch and English colonization, through to the burgeoning city’s transformation into a modern metropolis.

$19.95 / £14.99 paper 978-0-231-19495-2 $80.00 / £62.00 cloth 978-0-231-19494-5 May 2022 256 pages 196 illus. Fresh Kills

A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City Martin V. Melosi

Fresh Kills—a monumental 2,200-acre structure on Staten Island—was once the world’s largest landfill. Martin V. Melosi provides a comprehensive chronicle of Fresh Kills that offers new insights into the growth and development of New York City and the relationships between consumption, waste, and disposal.

$40.00 / £30.00 paper 978-0-231-18949-1 $120.00 / £94.00 cloth 978-0-231-18948-4 2020 800 pages 8 illus.

Before Central Park

Sara Cedar Miller

This book is the authoritative account of the place that would become Central Park. From the first Dutch family to settle on the land through the political crusade to create America’s first major urban park, Sara Cedar Miller chronicles two and a half centuries of history. She tells the stories of indigenous hunters, enslaved people and enslavers, American patriots and British loyalists, the Black landowners of Seneca Village, Irish pig farmers, tavern owners, Catholic sisters, Jewish protesters, and more. Reforming the City

The Contested Origins of Urban Government, 1890–1930 Ariane Liazos

Ariane Liazos examines the urban reform movement that swept through the United States in the early twentieth century -and its unintended consequences. Reforming the City offers powerful insights into the relationships between scholarship and reform and between the structures of city government and urban democracy.

$35.00 / £28.00 paper 978-0-231-19139-5 $105.00 / £88.00 cloth 978-0-231-19138-8 2019 400 pages