Jonathan Ezra Goldman discusses and signs HIDDEN HISTORIES OF JAZZ AGE NEW YORK

Please join us here at Barnes & Noble Upper West Side in welcoming Jonathan Ezra Goldman for a discussion and signing of HIDDEN HISTORIES OF JAZZ AGE NEW YORK. A purchase of HIDDEN HISTORIES OF JAZZ AGE NEW YORK from Barnes & Noble Upper West Side is required to join the signing line at this event. Please call ahead and speak to a bookseller and reserve your copy.

Jonathan Ezra Goldman (he/him) 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. The director of the digital project, NY 1920s: 100 Years Ago Today, When We Became Modern, he is president of the James Joyce Society (founded in 1947) and bandleader of Spanglish Fly. A New York City native, Jonathan lives in the Mitchell-Lama building where he grew up.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York offers a fresh look at 1920s New York City, unearthing stories of everyday life and marginalized communities. In sections that intertwine entertainment, politics, art, technology, crime, shopping, eating, and recreation, the book portrays sweeping events such as the Harlem Renaissance, Prohibition, and immigration reform through anecdotes of individual experiences that counter the era's popular conceptions of ballooning wealth and uproarious celebration. Jonathan Ezra Goldman's whirlwind tour of early 1920s New York City 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, overcrowded jails, 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 crowds, automobile traffic, and rapidly changing technology and urban infrastructure, as well as erased stories of injustices like Jim Crow practices, immigration anxieties, and the violent treatment of political dissent. These stories still resonate today, showing that this dizzying, exuberant ride through hidden history can help twenty-first readers see our own moment more clearly.