New York: An Illustrated History of the People

According to the 1990 census, New York, for the first time in a century, had more foreign-born inhabitants than native-born residents. A city of continual immigration, New York's people have been documented by major artists and photographers from the earliest European settlers to the present.

In this majestic illustrated history, with over 500 prints, paintings, and photographs, many never before published, we see the arrival of the first wave of Dutch and Anglo-Saxon settlers in the seventeenth century. We progress through Irish and German immigrations in the mid-nineteenth century, the immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of vast numbers of Italians and Eastern European Jews as well as Greeks and Slavs, followed by African Americans moving from the South after World War I. Finally, as the twentieth century comes to a close, Caribbeans, Latinos, Africans, and Asians have become the dominant new New Yorkers.

As he did with Harlem on My Mind, The Lower East Side, American Jewish Album, and The Italian Americans, Allon Schoener has brought together wonderful images as well as documentary accounts from diaries, letters, news articles, and other sources, giving us the rich history and texture of this great city.

The definitive pictorial history of the diverse peoples of the world who have made New York their home.

Library Journal

This heavily illustrated book about the diversity of New York City's inhabitants focuses on the various waves of immigrants. Chapters group the subjects chronologically, with a brief overview of each period. New York is more than a mix of groups that originally came here from other countries, however. There are also Suffragettes and street vendors, bohemians and baseball players, taxi drivers and philanthropists and dozens of other groups; and most of these topics get a page in this study in contrasts. The distinct quality of various neighborhoods and boroughs at fixed points in time comes through in the pictures, although the ethnicity and demographics of most NYC neighborhoods have changed rapidly over the last few decades. Schoener's (Harlem on My Mind, LJ 8/95) text provides a very brief introduction to each group; the archival illustrations are the main reason to purchase. Although the book does not cover new ground and probably reinforces more than challenges existing ideas about the people of New York, it is an accessible presentation of a popular subject.--Kathleen Collins, Bank of America Archives, San Francisco

Allon Schoener is a renowned author and curator. He lives in Grafton, Vermont.