Reading list · 7 books
The Gilded Age and Tammany Hall
Books on Boss Tweed, machine politics, the Draft Riots and the tenements, from the Civil War to consolidation.
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The history
Machine Made (opens Bookshop.org)
Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics
Terry Golway · 2014
Golway argues that Tammany's ward organization served immigrant New Yorkers and helped shape the Democratic Party's later social policy.
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Reference
Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (opens Bookshop.org)
A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics
William L. Riordon · 1905
Riordon recorded talks by the Tammany state senator George Washington Plunkitt, who explains patronage and the difference between honest and dishonest graft in his own words.
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The history
The New York City Draft Riots (opens Bookshop.org)
Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War
Iver Bernstein · 1990
Bernstein places the July 1863 riots in the city's class, race and party politics, and traces what the violence meant for the years after.
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The history
The Great Bridge (opens Bookshop.org)
The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge
David McCullough · 1972
John Roebling, Washington Roebling and Emily Roebling built the Brooklyn Bridge between 1869 and 1883. McCullough tells it, including the caisson disease that disabled Washington.
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Reporting
How the Other Half Lives (opens Bookshop.org)
Studies Among the Tenements of New York
Jacob A. Riis · 1890
Riis, a police reporter, described Lower East Side tenements in text and photographs, and the book pushed the city toward tenement housing reform.
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The history
The Statue of Liberty (opens Bookshop.org)
A Transatlantic Story
Edward Berenson · 2012
Berenson traces how a French idea about liberty became the statue in New York Harbor, and how its meaning shifted for immigrants and Americans.
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The history
Five Points (opens Bookshop.org)
The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum
Tyler Anbinder · 2001
Anbinder reconstructs the Lower Manhattan neighborhood from census, tax and police records, and sorts its documented history from the legends.
Chosen by the New York Explained desk. No publisher pays for a place on this list. Updated September 2026.
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