By Jill Goetz and Darryl Geddes
The Encyclopedia of New York City was published in October 1995 by Yale University Press in association with the New York Historical Society and edited by Columbia University historian Kenneth T. Jackson. But there is a decidedly Cornell feel to this seven-pound reference work: four Cornell professors and a staff member have penned entries.
Urban historian Stuart M. Blumin wrote two entries in the
Encyclopedia: one on "hard-boiledness" and another on 19th-cen
tury reporter and satirist George G. Foster. Blumin traces hard-boiledness -- which he
defines as "brash, rude, tough and cynically indifferent or sometimes hostile to
the fate of others" -- back at least to the
1840s, when it was portrayed in the Benjamin Baker play
A Glance at New York in 1848, and in urban sketches by Ned
Buntline and George G. Foster.
In a second entry, Blumin chronicles Foster, a reporter for the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley in the 1840s and one of the city's first professional news reporters.
"It was a great challenge to write the history of New York City's economy in
4,000 words or less," said Matthew Drennan,professor of city and regional planning.
The assignment might have been difficult in that it demands an economy of words to describe such a complex issue, but writing or talking about New York City's economy comes easy to Drennan, who has authored numerous chapters and books on the subject and is oft-quoted in the New York press on local economic issues.
For anyone whose economic understanding of New York is limited to the price of hot pastrami on rye, then Drennan's entry is a must-read. He cites the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the rapid development of rail transportation among key post-Revolu tionary War developments that enabled New York to remain the country's most domi nant market, a position it held for decades.
The biggest challenge to New York as a national and international economic force, Drennan suggests, comes from Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles and Tokyo.
Robert Harris Jr., associate professor in the Africana Studies and Research Center,
wrote an entry on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, formed
in 1909, and three on some of its first leaders.
NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois was the first editor of the monthly publica tion The Crisis, which is still published today. A controversial figure, he resigned from the NAACP in 1948 and ran in 1950, unsuccessfully, for the U.S. Senate. Social worker and civil rights activist Mary White Ovington helped form the NAACP and wrote The Walls Came Tumbling Down, a memoir and history of the organization. Walter Francis White, who greatly increased the NAACP's membership, was later a spe cial correspondent for the New York Post during World War II.
Adele A. Lerner, archivist of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center since
1972, wrote four entries, on Cornell University Medical College, Lying-In Hospital,
New York Hospital and George N. Papanicolaou, M.D. Cornell's Medical College
was opened to students on Oct. 4, 1898, on the grounds of Bellevue Hospital; in 1900 it
moved to First Avenue at 28th Street. In 1927, it became formally affiliated with
New York Hospital, the nation's second oldest hospital (chartered in 1771).
The Lying-In maternity hospital was incorporated in 1799 and was formally af filiated with New York Hospital in 1928; it is now the obstetrics and gynecology divi sion of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. In a fourth entry, Lerner writes of Dr. Papanicolaou, a professor at Cornell Medical College's department of anatomy for four decades, who developed the widely used medical procedure for women, the "pap" test.
Government Professor Martin Shefter, author of the 1985 book
Political Crisis, Fiscal Crisis: The Collapse and Revival of
New York City and editor of the 1993 volume
Capital of the American Century: The National and International Influence of
New York City, has written six entries in the
Encyclopedia: three on former mayors (John Lindsay, Ed Koch and David Dinkins), two
on governing institutions (the Board of Estimate and Municipal Assistance Corp.) and
one on scandals and corruption. In the latter he notes some of the city's more notorious
cases of corruption, like that of Samuel Swartwout, collector of the Port of New
York, who stole $1 million in U.S. customs receipts and fled the country during the
Andrew Jackson administration.
Reviews of the encyclopedia have appeared in The New York Times Book Review and in the New York Review of Books.