Wednesday, August 31, 2011

At the end of the 1890s, a great wave of mergers, facilitated by titans of business like J.P. Morgan, created the modern corporate economy in America. The emergence of gigantic corporations like U.S. Steel and General Electric created a need for massive headquarters complexes, and the skyscraper was in effect the answer to that problem, according to American historian Mike Wallace, a noted authority on the history of New York City.

Wallace will speak on the "Emergence of the Skyscraper City" at 7 p.m., Friday, Sept. 9 in Kenan Auditorium on the campus of the University of North Carolina Wilmington. A part of UNCW's Teaching American History Lecture Series, presented by the Department of Philosophy and Religion, the event is free and open to the public. No tickets are required.

Wallace is distinguished professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, where he has taught since 1971, and the director of the Gotham Center for New York City History. Along with co-author Edwin G. Burrows, he won the Pulitzer Prize in History for the 1999 book Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. In 2000, he was a consultant for the PBS series New York: A Documentary Film, in which he also appeared.

"There was tremendous change in New York City from 1890-1910," said Wallace. "A spirit of consolidation swept through the city, starting with the political merger of 1898 that produced Greater New York itself. It extended to cultural institutions including museums, zoos, libraries and Coney Island, and also to infrastructure developments such as the subway system, bridges and tunnels."

While there was much support for this tremendous growth, there were also questions about the speed with which the city (and the country) was changing. "New York City was headquarters as well to the muckraking movement, a wave of investigative journalism that critiqued the dark side of these immense new concentrations of corporate and financial power," Wallace explained. His lecture will delve more deeply into these economic and cultural movements and their profound effects on the city of New York.

Wallace received his BA, MA and Ph.D. from Columbia University. He is the founder, co-publisher and co-editor of the Radical History Review and the author of Mickey Mouse History (1996), a collection of essays on American history. He is working on a sequel of Gotham that will cover the history of New York City from 1898 through the Second World War.

Teaching American History in North Carolina (TAHNC) is part of a nationwide Teaching American History federal grant program funded by the U.S. Department of Education. TAHNC helps social studies teachers connect the Cape Fear region's rich local history with the history of our nation. The program is open to K-12 teachers in Pender, New Hanover and Brunswick counties who cover American History objectives in their curriculum. The history lecture series speakers are chose for their relevance to classroom content developed by the participating teachers.

For more information, go to http://teachingamericanhistorync.org/

Media contact: Dana Fischetti, media relations manager, 910.508.3127 or fischettid@uncw.edu