Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York offers a fresh look at 1920s New York City, unearthing stories of everyday life and marginalized communities. Sweeping events such as the Harlem Renaissance, Prohibition, and immigration reform are seen through the individual experiences of librarians, cops, shopkeepers, sexworkers, ragpickers, dogs, and antivaxxers that counter the era’s popular conceptions of ballooning wealth and uproarious celebration.

Jonathan Ezra Goldman’s whirlwind tour of 1920s NYC visits an all-female police platoon, a Black amusement park shut down before it opened, an Arabic literary salon, socialist Puerto Rican cigar factories, Chinatown funerals, lesbian cafes, toxic dumps, and Ku Klux Klan recruitment offices. The grand narratives of the 1920s interweave with little-known anecdotes about well-known figures such as Marcus Garvey, Dorothy Parker, and Babe Ruth, serving as a backdrop to the everyday challenges and triumphs of a city beset by housing shortages, traffic chaos, and rapidly changing technology and urban infrastructure, as well as erased stories of injustices like white supremacist attacks, raids on gay bath houses, and mass deportations.

These stories still resonate today, testifying that this dizzying, exuberant ride through hidden history can help twenty-first readers see our own moment more clearly.

“Jonathan Goldman’s Hidden Histories is a wonder and a delight—a lyrical and surprising historical excavation of Jazz Age New York that had me riveted from page one. You will find plenty of familiar figures (Dorothy Parker, Babe Ruth) between these covers, but even more exciting are the unfamiliar ones. This book deserves a prominent place on any shelf of enduring works of New York City history.” — Jonathan Mahler, author of The Gods of New York

“Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York is that rare work of history that is both eminently scholarly—a nearly encyclopedic look at 1920s New York—and enchantingly readable ... A fantastic work of engaged scholarship.” — Hugh Ryan, author of When Brooklyn Was Queer

Jonathan Ezra Goldman is Professor in the Humanities Department at the New York

Institute of Technology. He is the author of Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity and

Joyce and the Law.

A specialist in twentieth-century literature and its popular culture and legal contexts, Goldman brings scholarly depth and a storyteller’s instinct to the hidden narratives of America’s most iconic city in its most iconic decade.