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Over several decades, African Americans built a robust national civil rights movement that culminated in the mid-1960s. Activists secured fundamental legal and voting rights, but their opponents, as well as many of their allies, defeated attempts at making economic rights part of the movement. Economic rights were paramount to Black people throughout the nation, especially so in the Northeast, where many national victories had little practical impact. New York City, home to a number of the country's civil rights organizations and leading theorists, as well as the strongest labor movement in the nation, demonstrates the limits of what activists were able to achieve. During these years of profound legal and legislative victories, Black workers saw their status decline and futures narrow. Racial income inequality grew, and economic changes impacted Black workers much more so than their white counterparts. The city's administration in the fifties and sixties made many promises to its Black residents but little concrete progress. In disregarding demands for economic justice nationwide, white politicians and officials, liberal, moderate and conservative, perpetuated a growing crisis in employment, with impacts in education, mental and physical health and quality of life, the legacies of which endure very much through today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses what the author refers to as the changing urban landscape in the television series "Gotham," and it mentions how "Gotham," which is a nickname for New York, New York, embraces the historical timeframe of the 1980s. According to the article, the fictional television city of Gotham struggles with issues involving organized crime, social inequality, and postindustrial capitalism, and social order. Global cities and the Batman comic book character are assessed.

Objectives. To compare trends in HIV outcomes for cisgender and transgender persons living with HIV (PLWH) in New York City. Methods. We used HIV surveillance data for the analysis. We based CD4 count on the last measurement in a calendar year and defined viral suppression as the last viral load being less than or equal to 200 copies per milliliter in the calendar year. Results. The estimated number of PLWH increased from 73 415 in 2007 to 83 299 in 2016, including 606 transgender persons (0.8%) in 2007 and 1054 transgender persons (1.3%) in 2016. The proportion with CD4 count of 500 cells per cubic millimeter or more increased from 38% in 2007 to 61% in 2016 among cisgender persons versus 32% to 60% among transgender persons. The proportion with a suppressed viral load increased from 52% in 2007 to 80% in 2016 among cisgender persons versus 42% to 73% among transgender persons. Conclusions. Among PLWH in New York City, CD4 count and viral suppression improved during 2007 to 2016, with larger improvements among transgender persons, leading to narrower gaps. However, continuing efforts to improve HIV outcomes among transgender PLWH are needed to further eliminate disparities, particularly in viral suppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the strategies and tactics of captive rebels who organized a multi-sited rebellion in the New York City jail system in 1970. Topics discussed include the demands of prisoners who seized the Manhattan House of Detention for Men and the Queens Branch House of Detention, the spread of the rebellion to several city jails, and the weaponization of prisoner culture. Also discussed are community support for the rebels and the restoration of surface order by penal authorities.

Dressed in a black kimono with his face painted white, Manuel Ramos Otero performed in a high-pitched voice for a rapt crowd. Holding a Japanese umbrella in his hands, he enacted a character named Tsuchigumo, a spider that appears in Noh drama, Japanese mythology, and comic forms of Japanese performance during "Fuegos fúnebres," a flamboyant low-budget performance held on two nights of 1980 in Old San Juan. Ramos Otero is known as the most important openly gay Puerto Rican writer of the twentieth century to give voice to an out gay experience. His work has been studied and championed by queer scholars and literary critics, and today, it is regarded as pioneering, helping blaze the path of contemporary literature with its forceful voice. He was emboldened by political and artistic developments that helped him define himself personally and aesthetically: expressed with intricate imagery and blunt action, his work featured complex characters who navigated the queer underworld. At summer's end of 1990, Ramos Otero went home to die. He died in Puerto Rico of AIDS-related causes, at a time when nobody knew how to deal with the disease's ravages. Nowadays, many Puerto Rican gay writers consider themselves Ramos Otero's heirs. This article--shaped by primary sources like Ramos Otero's archive in Columbia University and 20 interviews--examines Ramos Otero's life in New York, what theatricality has to do with his work and his impact in Puerto Rican sexualities through literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1980s, visible homelessness became one of the most pressing problems in New York City. While most New Yorkers expressed sympathy for the homeless, many of them also resisted efforts to site shelters and service facilities in their neighborhoods. But far from being simply a case of NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) sentiment, protests over the placement of these facilities arose in the context of decades-long neighborhood movements against urban disinvestment and the beginning of gentrification in some New York City neighborhoods. I argue that understanding this history is crucial to parsing the complex politics of anti-homeless facility protests in the 1980s and to understanding the rise of "quality of life" policies that would govern many neoliberal urban spaces by the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around 1940, a New York City organization known as the Dance Notation Bureau (DNB) began a decades-long effort to promote a system known as "Labanotation." Designed to capture the ephemeral, three- dimensional complexity of dance on the fl at surface of paper, the DNB believed that Labanotation held the key to modernizing the art form. Focusing on the period between 1940 and 1975, this article catalogues the Dance Notation Bureau's efforts to make dance both "literate" and "scientifi c" and explores how these efforts contributed to broader transformations in the defi nitions of creativity, preservation, authorship, and dance itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article compares and contrasts two late modernist public housing projects, Co-op City in New York City and Marzahn in East Berlin, East Germany. When completed, the developments could house 65,000 and 175,000 residents respectively. Topics explored include modern architecture, urban renewal, urban planning, community development, the Cold War, and architecture and social engineering.

This article analyzes the historical practices of one intergenerational activist community—squatters in New York City—to ground an ethnographic exploration of how oral history works as an affective social practice and a means for harnessing the authority of history. By comparing three case studies of oral history telling, the research presents instances in which history has been consciously used to try to pass on activist knowledge to a new generation through public discussions about the past and by making intimate conversations about the past into public documents. Oral history, a formalized practice with roots in the academy, thereby makes the power of history accessible to grassroots social movements. Its combination of authority and affective impact make it a powerful history-telling tool. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between 1951 and 1966, more than twelve hundred homeless, alcoholic men from New York's skid row were subjected to invasive medical procedures, including open perineal biopsy of the prostate gland. If positive for cancer, men typically underwent prostatectomy, surgical castration, and estrogen treatments. The Bowery series was meant to answer important questions about prostate cancer's diagnosis, natural history, prevention, and treatment. While the Bowery series had little ultimate impact on practice, in part due to ethical problems, its means and goals were prescient. In the ensuing decades, technological tinkering catalyzed the transformation of prostate cancer attitudes and interventions in directions that the Bowery series' promoters had anticipated. These largely forgotten set of practices are a window into how we have come to believe that the screen and radical treatment paradigm in prostate cancer is efficacious and the underlying logic of the twentieth-century American quest to control cancer and our fears of cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-1990s New York City inaugurated its era of mass misdemeanors by pioneering policing tactics featuring intensive enforcement against low-level offenses as part of its quality-of-life and urban crime control strategy. These tactics have since spread across the country and around the globe. But the New York City experiment embarrasses our traditional understanding of how an expansion of criminal enforcement should work: as misdemeanor arrests climbed dramatically as part of an intentional law enforcement strategy, the rate of criminal conviction fell sharply. Using extensive, original data from a multiyear study, this Article exposes an underappreciated model of criminal administration in New York City's processing of mass misdemeanors, one that makes sense of this trend. Misdemeanor justice in New York City has largely abandoned what I call the adjudicative model of criminal law administration--concerned with adjudicating specific cases--and instead operates under what I call the managerial model--concerned with managing people through engagement with the criminal justice system over time. The adjudicative model holds that courts stand between the proscriptions of substantive criminal law and the hard treatment of punishment by employing the criminal process to select the right people for punishment and to determine the proper amount. The managerial model does not depend on punishing individual instances of lawbreaking, but rather on using the criminal process to sort and regulate the populations targeted with these policing tactics over time. These findings challenge the "assembly-line" account so often associated with lower criminal courts, showing that misdemeanor courts engage in a tremendous amount of discretionary differentiation in the treatment of the people who flow through their operations. However, the basis of this differentiation is not what we would expect from the traditional adjudicative model of criminal law, namely guilt and blameworthiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How, and as what, are immigrant minorities incorporated into the political process? A set of prominent approaches focus on the political opportunity structure that immigrants encounter. Although promising in many aspects, these approaches fail to consider the internal heterogeneity of both immigrant populations and opportunity structures. This is partly a result of taking ethnic groups rather than political entrepreneurs as the unit of analysis and of not disaggregating the political context properly. I show how Russian-Jewish immigrant political entrepreneurs in New York City used very different strategies of ethnic mobilization, each emphasizing a different ethnic cleavage: one making claims in the name of Russians, the other downplaying Russianness and highlighting the Jewish identity dimension. Both strategies had good chances at success thus illustrating that political opportunity structures may encourage different claims-making strategies at the same time. Ethno-political entrepreneurs navigate complex political landscapes that are ex-ante only partially transparent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how the paradigm of cooperation, rather than competition, emerging in the field of ecology in the mid-20th century gave urban intellectuals in New York City a new way to frame the city's social issues. In particular, the publication of the work of nature writer Rachel Carson in "The New Yorker" magazine is seen as encouraging the rise of urban and community ecology, which in turn fueled the work of urban activists like Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" opposed the destruction of neighborhoods through urban renewal.