Black Gotham: A Book Talk by Author Carla Peterson

Join author Carla Peterson as she discusses her new book, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City. Mining city archives, Peterson reconstructs her family’s history to paint a vivid and largely unknown portrait of African American elites before the Civil War. With a focus on the lives of her great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather, and their circle of friends, she depicts the neighborhoods in which they lived, in and around Greenwich Village. Home to diverse populations, this area was inhabited by whites and blacks, Irish, German, and native born, upper, middle, and lower classes that produced complex social and professional relations both within and outside the black community.