Wednesday Oct 8, 2014
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10003
RSVP required.

The Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to a discussion with Ted Steinberg and Andrew Needham on Steinberg’s new book Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York. Steinberg will use the book and his historical understanding to address a question of some urgency: Can New York City survive the sea? He will look at what the city has done in the past to deal with coastal flooding, as well as current plans in the wake of Sandy.

Gotham Unbound is the story of the monumental struggle between New York and the natural world. From Henry Hudson’s discovery of Mannahatta to Hurricane Sandy, this is Ted Steinberg’s sweeping ecological history of one of the most man-made spots on earth. Here is a tale of “the world with us”—lots of us—a groundbreaking book that recounts the four-century history of how hundreds of square miles of open marshlands became home to six percent of the nation’s population.

Steinberg brings a vanished New York back to life. You will see the metropolitan area anew, not just as a dense urban goliath but as an estuary once home to miles of oyster reefs, wolves, whales, and blueberry bog thickets. That world gave way to an onslaught managed by thousands, from Governor John Montgomerie, who turned water into land, and John Randel, who imposed a grid on Manhattan, to Robert Moses, Charles Urstadt, Donald Trump, and Michael Bloomberg.

Ted Steinberg is the Adeline Barry Davee Distinguished Professor of History and Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University. His publications have focused on the intersection of environmental, social, and legal history. His books include American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn; Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History, a National Outdoor Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize Nominee in History; Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America, a Pulitzer Prize Nominee in General Non-Fiction; and Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England which won the Willard Hurst Prize in American Legal History and the Old Sturbridge Village E. Harold Hugo Memorial Book Prize. 

Andrew Needham is an Associate Professor of History at New York University. He specializes in recent United States history, with teaching and research emphases in environmental, American Indian, and urban and suburban history as well as the history of the American West. His forthcoming book, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest explores the interconnected transformation of Phoenix and the Navajo Nation in the years after World War II.