Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York
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Current Issue
Books & the Arts
/ February 9, 2026
Lucky Corner
How Fiorello La Guardia and a popular front of radicals and reformers transformed New York City
Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York
How the popular mayor and a popular front of radicals and reformers transformed New York City
Michael Kazin
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Fiorello La Guardia speaking in 1933 in East Harlem.(Irving Haberman / Getty)
This article appears in the
March 2026 issue.
Mike Wallace’s Gotham at War is the third and final volume of the most ambitious—and probably the lengthiest—work ever produced about the history of a single American metropolis. The first, simply titled Gotham, came out in 1999 and was cowritten with Edwin G. Burrows. More than 1,000 pages long, it began with the fateful meeting on the island of Manhattan between Lenape natives and Dutch colonists early in the 17th century and concluded with the merger of the five boroughs into a single “supercity” in 1898. It won the Pulitzer Prize for history.
Books in review
Gotham at War: A History of New York City From 1933 to 1945
by Mike Wallace
Buy this book
Wallace then took 18 years to produce a sequel. Greater Gotham’s time frame was far more modest than its predecessor’s. Writing solo this time, Wallace zeroed in on the two decades between 1898 and the end of World War I. But like the first book, Greater Gotham contained multitudes, with fascinating chapters on everything from the subway, housing, and the Bronx Zoo to vaudeville, feminism, and child labor.
While not neglecting tales of social and cultural life, Gotham at War focuses more on the eruptions from elsewhere that shook and remade New York City. It begins in 1933 with a Brooklyn-based boycott of goods made in Nazi Germany and concludes with the decision by United Nations delegates to make the city their permanent headquarters. Like the previous volumes, its achievement lies not in its interpretive framework but rather in the wealth of detail that Wallace discovers and rolls out in a style both vivid and precise.
Taken as a whole, this grand trilogy represents an unstated tribute to the new social history, or “people’s history,” that became popular beginning in the 1960s. Now 83, Wallace was one of the founding editors of Radical History Review, the journal that helped to pioneer this emerging genre of scholarship. He had studied with the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Richard Hofstadter when getting his PhD at Columbia. But like many of his New Left peers, he grew frustrated with the kind of consensus political history that was being written by liberals like his adviser, which then dominated …
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Current Issue
Books & the Arts
/ February 9, 2026
Lucky Corner
How Fiorello La Guardia and a popular front of radicals and reformers transformed New York City
Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York
How the popular mayor and a popular front of radicals and reformers transformed New York City
Michael Kazin
Share
Copy Link
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Ad Policy
Fiorello La Guardia speaking in 1933 in East Harlem.(Irving Haberman / Getty)
This article appears in the
March 2026 issue.
Mike Wallace’s Gotham at War is the third and final volume of the most ambitious—and probably the lengthiest—work ever produced about the history of a single American metropolis. The first, simply titled Gotham, came out in 1999 and was cowritten with Edwin G. Burrows. More than 1,000 pages long, it began with the fateful meeting on the island of Manhattan between Lenape natives and Dutch colonists early in the 17th century and concluded with the merger of the five boroughs into a single “supercity” in 1898. It won the Pulitzer Prize for history.
Books in review
Gotham at War: A History of New York City From 1933 to 1945
by Mike Wallace
Buy this book
Wallace then took 18 years to produce a sequel. Greater Gotham’s time frame was far more modest than its predecessor’s. Writing solo this time, Wallace zeroed in on the two decades between 1898 and the end of World War I. But like the first book, Greater Gotham contained multitudes, with fascinating chapters on everything from the subway, housing, and the Bronx Zoo to vaudeville, feminism, and child labor.
While not neglecting tales of social and cultural life, Gotham at War focuses more on the eruptions from elsewhere that shook and remade New York City. It begins in 1933 with a Brooklyn-based boycott of goods made in Nazi Germany and concludes with the decision by United Nations delegates to make the city their permanent headquarters. Like the previous volumes, its achievement lies not in its interpretive framework but rather in the wealth of detail that Wallace discovers and rolls out in a style both vivid and precise.
Taken as a whole, this grand trilogy represents an unstated tribute to the new social history, or “people’s history,” that became popular beginning in the 1960s. Now 83, Wallace was one of the founding editors of Radical History Review, the journal that helped to pioneer this emerging genre of scholarship. He had studied with the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Richard Hofstadter when getting his PhD at Columbia. But like many of his New Left peers, he grew frustrated with the kind of consensus political history that was being written by liberals like his adviser, which then dominated …
Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York
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Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York
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Politics
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The Nation
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Current Issue
Books & the Arts
/ February 9, 2026
Lucky Corner
How Fiorello La Guardia and a popular front of radicals and reformers transformed New York City
Fiorello La Guardia and the Making of Modern New York
How the popular mayor and a popular front of radicals and reformers transformed New York City
Michael Kazin
Share
Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Email
Ad Policy
Fiorello La Guardia speaking in 1933 in East Harlem.(Irving Haberman / Getty)
This article appears in the
March 2026 issue.
Mike Wallace’s Gotham at War is the third and final volume of the most ambitious—and probably the lengthiest—work ever produced about the history of a single American metropolis. The first, simply titled Gotham, came out in 1999 and was cowritten with Edwin G. Burrows. More than 1,000 pages long, it began with the fateful meeting on the island of Manhattan between Lenape natives and Dutch colonists early in the 17th century and concluded with the merger of the five boroughs into a single “supercity” in 1898. It won the Pulitzer Prize for history.
Books in review
Gotham at War: A History of New York City From 1933 to 1945
by Mike Wallace
Buy this book
Wallace then took 18 years to produce a sequel. Greater Gotham’s time frame was far more modest than its predecessor’s. Writing solo this time, Wallace zeroed in on the two decades between 1898 and the end of World War I. But like the first book, Greater Gotham contained multitudes, with fascinating chapters on everything from the subway, housing, and the Bronx Zoo to vaudeville, feminism, and child labor.
While not neglecting tales of social and cultural life, Gotham at War focuses more on the eruptions from elsewhere that shook and remade New York City. It begins in 1933 with a Brooklyn-based boycott of goods made in Nazi Germany and concludes with the decision by United Nations delegates to make the city their permanent headquarters. Like the previous volumes, its achievement lies not in its interpretive framework but rather in the wealth of detail that Wallace discovers and rolls out in a style both vivid and precise.
Taken as a whole, this grand trilogy represents an unstated tribute to the new social history, or “people’s history,” that became popular beginning in the 1960s. Now 83, Wallace was one of the founding editors of Radical History Review, the journal that helped to pioneer this emerging genre of scholarship. He had studied with the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Richard Hofstadter when getting his PhD at Columbia. But like many of his New Left peers, he grew frustrated with the kind of consensus political history that was being written by liberals like his adviser, which then dominated …
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