Gotham on the Verge: The Remaking of a Modern Global American City

Post-1960s New York City is often imagined as exceptional-too big, too singular, too creative to fit prevailing trajectories of American history.Gotham on the Verge challenges that mythology. In seventeen essays, leading and emerging historians show late-twentieth-century New York not as an outlier but as a crucible for the forces that reshaped the nation.Covering the 1970s through the early 2000s, this volume examines the rise and consequences of post-industrialization, neoliberalism, and financialization during a transformative era in the city’s history. The essays explore deindustrialization, the rise of finance and real estate, the city’s response to the AIDS epidemic, police violence, labor organizing among new immigrants, and the birth of hip hop and experimental art.Writing from the street level up, the contributors center ordinary New Yorkers: residents who challenged stigmatizing media portrayals, Black women who organized against police brutality, and immigrant workers who bu