Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 spent more than two decades in the making before Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace finished it, and the result runs to over a thousand pages tracing the city from a Dutch trading post on the tip of Manhattan through its consolidation into a five borough metropolis in 1898. The authors follow the settlement through Dutch and then English colonial rule, the slave trade that helped build early New York's economy, and the revolution that turned a loyalist stronghold into an American city.

The book covers the eras readers expect from a great port city: immigration in successive waves from Ireland, Germany and beyond, the growth of Wall Street and organized commerce, Tammany Hall's political machine, and violent flashpoints like the Civil War draft riots of 1863, when opposition to conscription turned into days of rioting and racial violence in the streets. Burrows and Wallace move through this material with an eye for the specific, the tenement block as much as the boardroom, and connect New York's commercial ambition to the political corruption and reform movements that grew up alongside it.

Reading Gotham means committing to genuine scale, a book built to be consulted and returned to rather than finished in a sitting, and it suits a reader who wants New York's transformation from outpost to global city told in full rather than compressed into a single familiar narrative. Its authors planned it as the first of a multivolume history, and readers who finish this opening installment can follow the city's story further in Greater Gotham, the sequel that appeared in 2017.