New York At War: Four Centuries Of Combat, Fear And Intrigue In Gotham

Synopsis

InNew York at War, historian Steven H. Jaffe offers an alternative history of New York City—arguably the most powerful and yet also the most vulnerable city on earth, and a place whose landscape, culture, and inhabitants have been shaped by violence near and far. The threats of war to New York have not always been direct, but even distant wars have had an important influence on the city. Beginning with an Indian attack on one of Henry Hudson’s crewmen (who in 1609 became the first recorded fatality of an act of war in the region’s history), Jaffe describes, in turn, each of the city’s encounters with war over the past four centuries. He recounts the threats Dutch settlers faced from Indians (and each other) after the West India Company established New Amsterdam in 1624; the British encroachment and eventual invasion that transformed the Dutch town into an English colony in 1664; the colonial wars (such as Queen Anne’s War and the French and Indian Wars) that affected the city over the next hundred years; and the divisions and depredations New York endured during the Revolutionary War. The city soon experienced new threats (and became a major naval stronghold) during the Quasi-War with France and the War of 1812, which is now viewed as a second war of independence. The nation’s newfound freedom did nothing to shield New York from the global conflicts that followed the Revolutionary War; in fact, New Yorkers’ sense of vulnerability persisted—and in many ways worsened—in the 19th and 20th centuries. Jaffe shows how New York became hugely powerful as the Union’s “money city” during the Civil War, but nevertheless retained strong economic and emotional ties to the South, and was so wracked by draft riots in 1863 that people suspected a Confederate plot was behind the violence. Many African-American New York