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The 'greatest historian' of NYC finishes epic trilogy with 'Gotham at War'
By
Ryan Kailath
Published Oct 12, 2025
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Paula Vlodkowsky Photography / Courtesy of CUNY Graduate Center
By
Ryan Kailath
Published Oct 12, 2025
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The pages of “Gotham at War” recount a history that feels disturbingly relevant.
Tensions rise in the city over race, religion, class, immigration and political legitimacy. Author Mike Wallace traces cultural resistance via comic books and music, the pluralist coalitions of labor and religious groups, and the shifting allegiances of the city’s elites.
That atmosphere, he argues, prefigures the coming of World War II. Wallace tells the colorful stories of real New Yorkers, such as at an anti-Nazi protest in 1933, where members of the Undertakers’ Union carried signs that read "WE WANT HITLER." German U-Boats pick off American ships in the Port of New York. There’s the East Harlem-born circus acrobat and singing waiter who finally landed an acting gig in the U.S. Army’s traveling entertainment division before returning to New York City, where he was discovered and eventually became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Burt Lancaster.
“‘Gotham at War’ is the final volume in a trilogy which has been a half-century in the making,” Peter-Christian Aigner, head of the Gotham Center for New York City History at CUNY, said at an event Thursday evening celebrating Wallace’s latest history. Wallace founded the center in 2000. “Fifty years of research that produced three landmark books, which in turn have established Mike Wallace as the greatest historian of New York City.”
Hundreds of scholars, students and history lovers gathered at the CUNY Graduate Center in Midtown to mark the publication of the 958-page “Gotham at War,” and to honor the life of its author, a distinguished professor emeritus at the center and John Jay College.
The borough historian, Robert Snyder, came bearing a last-minute proclamation from City Hall: Oct. 8, 2025 was officially “Mike Wallace Day,” in honor of the author’s six decades of work documenting the city’s civic, economic and cultural history.
Columbia history Professor Victoria de Grazia speaks at the CUNY Graduate Center in Midtown about Mike Wallace's histories of New York City
Paula Vlodkowsky Photography / Courtesy of CUNY Graduate Center
The applause lasted so long that the entire room eventually stood as Wallace waved in appreciation from the front row. He wasn’t able to speak at the event due to health reasons.
The moment marked more than a book launch; it was the culmination of a half-century literary and historical project that has become foundational to how New Yorkers understand their city. Wallace’s Gotham trilogy, now complete, is an ambitious, encyclopedic civic artifact that argues a single city can reflect the story of a nation.
“Each chapter plays like a short story”
The first volume of the series, “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 and covered New York City’s history from early European exploration up to New Year’s Day of 1898, when four independent cities surrounding Manhattan were incorporated into New York City as “boroughs.”
The 1,408-page opus, written with the late Brooklyn College professor Edwin Burrows, moves with the pace of a page-turner, and over the decades, tackling it has become a rite of passage for New Yorkers. Readers who stop to mark every interesting fact with sticky-notes will find their copies soon feature more adhesive than ink. They become the kind of New York walking companions who stop every five minutes to say things like: “Did you know this public school was a federal prison and Boss Tweed died there?” or “Did you know our office was the site of Aaron Burr’s mansion?”
A second enormous volume followed in 2017 and covered only the next two decades: “Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919.”
Wallace, who is 83, skipped the Roaring ’20s and early 1930s, with their Prohibition, gangsterism and Gatsby-ism, Wall Street excess and burgeoning depression, and instead jumped ahead to the years before the war.
Philip Lopate, the critic, author and longtime admirer of Wallace, called “Gotham at War” his favorite of the series, and said the earlier volumes had taught him how to read the city as a tapestry of individual stories.
Wallace was in the front row as historians discussed the impact of his three-part series on the city's.
Paula Vlodkowsky Photography / Courtesy of CUNY Graduate Center
“Each chapter plays like a short story, because Mike Wallace is a very good storyteller,” Lopate said. “That’s what makes the book so entertaining is [his] sense of irony and a real sense of humor.”
Niko Pfund, Wallace’s longtime publisher at Oxford University Press, recounted how in one Kindle e-book promotion, the first Gotham volume sold an astonishing 16,000 copies in a single day.
And the influential American historian Eric Foner, speaking of their shared days at Columbia, recalled how Wallace helped shift the discipline’s attention towards the overlooked perspectives often left out of history.
Kim Phillips-Fein, a Columbia scholar whose 2017 history of the city’s fiscal crisis was a Pulitzer finalist, noted that “Gotham at War” ends on the utopian vision that the United Nations brought to New York City after the war.
But the very last paragraphs of the book, Phillips-Fein notes, are about how the origin story of the U.N. also involves a classic New York City land deal, where developer William Zeckendorf wanted to offload his East River property covered in slums and slaughterhouses, and makes off with $8.5 million.
“It’s really a perfect ending, just the sublime and the actual world of profit-interested individuals making their way all at once,” Phillips-Fein said. “Those things aren’t separate. They are what the world is, and they are what history is.”
Tagged
literature
new york city
Ryan Kailath
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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