A History of New York

For most immigrants in the early 1900s, New York City was then first glimpse of the United States - it promised escape from poverty, oppression, and war and harbored their dreams for a better life.

Today New York remains the symbol of American enterprise and energy - the embodiment of commerce and diversity.

As Francois Weil writes in his foreword, "New York is not America but what America promises, perhaps its greatest promise." It may be hard to believe, then, that the city of dreams was once quite low in America's political and social hierarchy, its growth slow and halting.

This compelling, single-volume history takes on the New York of myth and offers an original analysis of how it actually developed into a global city - what some have called the capital of the twenty-first century.

Founded in the 1620s as New Amsterdam, New York City maintains a perpetual and uneasy tension between capitalism and multiculturalism.The book shows how, over the course of nearly four centuries, this tension has been at the heart of the city's immense physical, social, economic, and cultural transformation as well as of American notions of what urban "space" is, for whom it exists, and how it is used.

The book also captures what makes New York unique: the arts and the literature, social and political coalitions and clashes, the popular and party politics.

The result is an exhilarating history that reveals New York as both a unique space and an example of American diversity.