NYC Cultural History: Part One

We begin with a look at the earliest European encounters with Native Algonquian peoples, the Dutch West India Company's New Amsterdam, British colonial New York, the American Revolution, and the establishment of New York as the first capital of the Nation. Waves of early 19th century German and Irish immigration, and the Draft Riots of the Civil War era challenged the traditional character of the city, but Whitman celebrated NYC's new urban milieu in Leaves of Grass, while Olmsted designed Central Park and Prospect Park as social reform projects aimed at accommodating the needs of a culturally and ethnically diverse city.

Writers Henry James and Edith Wharton, architect Stanford White, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and New York Impressionist painters William Merritt Chase and Childe Hassam portray for us NYC's Gilded Age. But there was another New York, removed from these rarified zones; it was the world of How the Other Half Lives, a teeming world of immigrants and tenements concentrated in New York's Lower East Side, a world exposed by crusading journalist Jacob Riis, whose work laid the groundwork for Progressive Era reform policies.