During the Covid-19 pandemic, it became something of a cliché for New Yorkers to appear on Zoom calls with certain books displayed behind them, to convey their appreciation of good writing about our city.

No work deserves such pride of place more than the volumes in Mike Wallace’s Gotham series, which tell the story of New York from its founding as a Dutch colonial seaport to the end of World War II. Deeply researched and vividly written, they express important ideas without ever descending into academic jargon. The series is a masterpiece of history, literature, and scholarly thought

Today brings the publication of the final Gotham volume that Mike (pictured below) will himself author – like its predecessors, brought out by Oxford University Press. It’s a fitting moment to appraise the achievements of a writer, scholar, and teacher who has created such a rich and original tapestry of New York City’s history.

As befits a historian, Mike was profoundly shaped by his time and place: Columbia University, where he earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., in the 1960s.

Mike participated in the civil rights movement, campus protests, and the New Left. With the eminent political historian Richard Hofstadter, he edited the documentary history American Violence, and came away from the experience convinced that conflict, not consensus, was central to American history.

He became part of a generation of historians pursuing what was then called the “New Social History.” Invigorated by Marxist scholarship, they pushed for history told “from the bottom up.” Understanding our past, they believed, necessarily involved incorporating the narratives and perspectives of workers, enslaved people, women, and immigrants, not just those of political and economic elites.

By 1971, Mike was teaching at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at CUNY. Soon he helped found the Radical History Review, which took challenging ideas from the margins to the mainstream in the historical profession. He explored ways of presenting history in museum exhibits, radio documentaries, and walking tours.

With Edwin G. Burrows, a history professor at Brooklyn College, Mike planned to write a history of the United States organized around the theme of American capitalism. The project proved so large and time-consuming that they shifted focus to New York City. The book they envisioned would convey life under capitalism: its booms and busts, its class relations, its impact on gender and race, ethnicity and nationality. It would be scholarly, accessible to the general public, and a good read.

The finished product was all of these and more. The first volume, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, written with Burrows, won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for History. and other awards. The second, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919, with Mike as the sole author, won the 2017 New York Society Library Prize for Book of the Year. The third volume, Gotham at War: A History of New York City from 1933 to 1945, appears today.

Looking at all three volumes, it is possible to discern their collective strengths.

With elegant prose, Mike constantly conveys omnivorous research and a sure grasp of social and economic change, always brightened with deft portraits of people and places. By organizing his narrative into what he calls “mosaic murals” that present short chapters within larger thematic sections, he delivers a precise and panoramic sense of the whole city and its many parts and people.

Mike’s New York has a distinctive history, but he never trafficked in exceptionalism or boosterism. He was engrossed by the city that has been the center of the US economy for 200 years and of the world’s economy for more than 100. In his telling, capitalism made New York important, but it also made it a city of convulsive changes, unparalleled diversity, and myriad inequalities. Mike is fascinated by the dynamism of capitalism and the wealth it produces, but he suggests that New York works best when those forces are harnessed to the public good.

Mike is a politically engaged historian, but his books do not belabor readers with his politics. He is clearly fond of the radicals and fighting liberals of the 1930s, but his holistic approach to history enables him to portray Wall Streeters as well as garment workers. Readers more conservative than Mike can enjoy his books for their verve and commanding sweep, and appreciate his assessments of the past’s famous figures.

Mike is always alive to the contradictions of the city’s life. His New York is both the capital of capitalism and an incubator of radical alternatives, a city that generated massive wealth and spawned generous social welfare programs. It is a place of enduring racism that also made Harlem the capital of the African diaspora in the twentieth century. Mike’s history suggests that the convulsive changes that constantly redefine New York City will never reach a fixed end point, even as our city’s past shapes our best and worst possibilities in the present.

Ill health and the growing scale of the Gotham series prevented Mike from writing about the 1920s and early 1930s and led him to jump straight to the dramatic New Deal and World War II years for his final work. For now, we can savor the possibility that others may convert Mike’s notes and drafts into a complete volume that will cover the 1920s and early 1930s, exploring the Harlem Renaissance, Prohibition, the emergence of organized crime, the growth of the Bronx and Queens, and the role of New York City in national fights over immigration restriction following World War I.

And on Oct. 8, when scholars and friends gather at the CUNY Graduate Center to celebrate his newest work, there are sure to be discussions of how Mike would have written a volume covering the years since 1945. How would he have handled New York’s deindustrialization, the conservative turn in the city’s politics in the 1970s, the legacy of Robert Moses? And where would he have ended the book? The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001? The Great Recession of 2007-2009? The Covid-19 pandemic?

The one certainty is that for decades to come, people around the world who want to understand New York City from its birth to 1945 will begin with the words of Mike Wallace. To paraphrase Walt Whitman: whatever your question, he is somewhere up ahead waiting for you.

Robert W. Snyder is the Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University. His latest book, an oral history of the Covid-19 pandemic, is When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers.

Photo credits: Bruce Cory; Oxford University Press.

Mike Wallace And the Triumph Of the Gotham Trilogy