“Crisis and Confidence” uses the sweeping transformation of post-1960s New York City to understand the broader economic and political remaking of the United States in the twentieth century. The project begins in the crisis-plagued New York of the 1960s, the inauguration of more than a decade of widespread economic and political turmoil, and ends with the city’s proclaimed resurgence in the 1990s. Using municipal and state administrative records, oral histories, and the non-archived papers of organizations, activist groups, and individuals, I document how diverse groups of city-dwellers, including grassroots organizations, non-profit foundations, elites, and elected officials worked to reshape New York as overlapping and reinforcing crises disrupted long-standing logics of urban governance and economics. I argue that the imaginative remedies and policy prescriptions New Yorkers at different scales of power advanced to address these crises together forged a broad market-based governing logic for New York. Scholars exploring the major political and economic shifts of the latter twentieth-century United States have overwhelmingly focused either on the dogged influence of the business sector, economists, libertarians, or conservative activists or have looked to the formal electoral sphere, particularly at the federal level. These works, however, do not adequately account for the transformative role of people and processes that were local, politically left and moderate, or outside of electoral politics. This gap leaves us without a sufficient understanding of how market logics have come to proliferate across American life and transform even powerful bastions of liberalism like New York. “Crisis and Confidence” moves away from the conventional narratives of conservatives and free market proponents to consider a wider variety of local actors that included residents, non-profits, community groups, professional organizations, and Democratic and liberal officials. My project connects the difficult, sometimes-desperate, everyday choices citizens and policymakers faced in alleviating local conditions to how their decisions – in ways both intended and unanticipated – facilitated the broader shift toward a political economy evermore reliant on the private sector and market solutions.
All rights reserved. Collection is open to the Brown community for research.
Citation
Holtzman, Benjamin I.,
"Crisis and Confidence: Reimagining New York City in the Late Twentieth Century"
(2016).
History Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0NV9GN9
