History

How Pulitzer and Hearst invented outrage journalism in 1890s New York — and built the template cable news and social media still use today.

Wars, famines, generations of political turmoil… Slavic people have endured some of the worst hardships in modern human history. National boundaries have been drawn and redrawn over and over again. By the late 19th century, America gave some reprieve from… Read More »Slavic NYC: The Deep Roots of Eastern Europe in the Five Boroughs

Rent in 1900: Cheap on Paper, Hard in Reality At the beginning of the twentieth century, many working-class New Yorkers lived in tenement buildings in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side. These apartments were small and often poorly ventilated. Bathrooms… Read More »Cost of Living in NYC in 1900 vs Today: Rent, Wages, and Real Life

This article is adapted from the upcoming book People vs. Power: The Real Estate Battles That Shaped New York City by LESHP founder, Eric Ferrara. The book examines historic land use and development conflicts across the Five Boroughs, focusing on… Read More »The Proposed Brooklyn-Battery Bridge

“A Language Without a Country” Comes to America Yiddish—a fusion of German, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages—was born in medieval Central Europe. For centuries, it thrived in the shtetls (market towns) of Eastern Europe as the everyday tongue of Jews, carrying their… Read More »Hey Putz, This is How Yiddish Became the Secret Language of American Culture