Historian’s ‘Gotham’ won Pulitzer
Edwin who G. Burrows, co-wrote a historian the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Gotham,” a sweeping and stylish chronicle of New York City from the Ice Age to the Gilded Age, died Friday at his home in Huntington, N.Y. He was 74.
The cause was complications of a parkinsonian syndrome, said his daughter, Kate Burrows.
Comprehensive histories of New York have been published as early as 1757, when jurist William Smith Jr. completed his Colonialera “History of the Province of New-York,” and 1809, when writer Washington Irving penned a satirical account of the city he dubbed Gotham — old Anglofor “Goats’ Town.”
But few recent histories existed in 1999, when Mr. Burrows and his writing partner, historian Mike Wallace, “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.”
Weighing nearly five pounds and spanning 1,424 pages, the book marshaled scholarship from social, intellectual, military, political and economic history to cover the years from the Native American settlement of Manna-hata (“hilly island”) to the consolidation of the five boroughs as the city of Greater New York.
“I know this sounds crazy, but there are probably 15,000 or maybe 20,000 books on New York City. Not a single one does what they did,” Kenneth Jackson, a Columbia University history professor and editor of the “Encyclopedia of New York City,” said in a phone interview. “The book is a towering achievement. It really is almost the only scholarly interpretive history of New York that’s based on a full knowledge of all the secondary literature.” The book, as poet Walt Whitman might have said, contained multitudes. Its cast of characters included millionaire John Jacob Astor, social reformer Joanna Bethune, novelist Herman Melville and Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed, who together helped explain howSaxon New York became, in Mr. Whitman’s words, “the great place of the Western Continent, the heart, the brain, the focus, the main spring, the pinnacle, the extremity, the no more beyond of the new world.” Beyond individual historical figures, “Gotham” also aimed to captured the emerging histories of race, class and gender in America. Mr. Burrows and Mr. Wallace met around 1970, in a graduate seminar at Columbia University, and together helped establish the Radical History Review, an academic journal that aimed to foster new, more inclusive approaches to history. “With some megalomania,” Mr. Wallace recalled, they set out to present their methods to a general audience, by using new scholarship to write a comprehensive history of the United States. They made it partway through the 17th century, he said, when “it became clear that we would need multiple lifetimes, and we only had the two between us.”
Refocusing their project on the history of a single city, New York, they divided the workload. Mr. Burrows, a Brooklyn College history professor with a background in early American studies, covered the 17th and 18th centuries. Mr. Wallace, a history professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, covered the 19th and 20th centuries.
It took 20 years to produce “Gotham,” which fell more than a century short of covering the city’s full history. (In 2017, Mr. Wallace continued the series solo with “Greater Gotham,” which devoted 1,196 pages to the 21 years between the first volume and the close of World War I. A third volume is projected to cover the years between the two world wars.)
“There came that moment in October when I opened a box and there was the book,” Mr. Burrows told Newsday in 1999, soon after “Gotham” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history. “I was very excited — elated. There was this book. But it’s like giving birth, I would imagine. You labor and you labor and then it has a life of its own and in some ways it’s no longer entirely yours anymore.”
Mr. Burrows’ research for “Gotham” led to two smaller-scale projects, including “The Finest Building in America: The New York Crystal Palace, 18531858,” which he published in February. The book chronicled a glass structure at Reservoir Square, now Bryant Park, modeled after a similarly elaborate Crystal Palace in London. Both buildings were destroyed by fires.
He also wrote “Forgotten Patriots” (2008), which Mr. Jackson described as the first major history of American prisoners of war during the Revolutionary War.