The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn by Suleiman Osman

"The train climbed the steel trestle high over the forest of red and brown buildings that tumbled across the landscape," wrote Harrison Salisbury in his 1958 account of life among Brooklyn's fighting teen gangs, The Shook-Up Generation. "From the platform . . . I looked down in the tenement back yards, the rubbish piles and bright paper tatters brightened by wash lines of blue and pink, purple and yellow. Here and there I saw the scraggly green of Brooklyn back-yard trees dwarfed by soot and sickened by cinders."

This grim landscape, once an ill-defined slum housing Italian dockworkers, is

print Apr/May 2010

The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal

In September 1966, the militant Quebec separatists Pierre Vallières and Charles Gagnon, wanted by Canadian police for a spate of bombings, came out of hiding to issue a statement at United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. Quebecers were, they declared, an oppressed group whose struggles mirrored the decolonization efforts of subjected peoples worldwide. Calling for Quebec independence and the release of political prisoners, they vowed to stage a hunger strike. It was short-lived: New York police arrested the men the next day.

During the years of imprisonment that followed, Vallières wrote