UPDATE, NOVEMBER 2025:

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. The grand narratives of the 1920s interweave with little-known anecdotes about well-known figures such as Marcus Garvey, Dorothy Parker, and Babe Ruth, serving as a backdrop to the everyday challenges and triumphs of a city beset by housing shortages, traffic chaos, and rapidly changing technology and urban infrastructure, as well as erased stories of injustices like white supremacist attacks, raids on gay bath houses, and mass deportations. 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.

Jonathan Ezra Goldman is Professor in the Humanities Department at New York Institute of Technology. His previous books include Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity and Joyce and the Law. A native New Yorker, he still lives in the city.

$29.95/T paperback ISBN 979-8-8558-0621-2