Black Metropolis: Harlem, 1915-1930

Our aim is to produce an ethnographic study of everyday life in Harlem as it became the black capital of the world. Not only will our project be a contribution to the exciting historiography of African American culture, but it will be at the cutting edge of new scholarship about twentieth-century America, it will also offer a model of the ways in which the ‘everyday’ can be recovered and demonstrate the advantages, in terms of deeper insights into early twentieth-century black urban life, that such a recovery can yield.

This ongoing collaborative project is one of the first fruits of the research strength in American history that the Department of History has developed in recent years.

In addition to those involved in this project, there are four other historians of the United States in the department, a concentration that establishes the university as the largest centre for research in American history in the southern hemisphere.

The project is supported by an ARC Discovery Grant, one of the largest ever awarded in the humanities and the first for a collaborative project on this scale.

Unlike most studies of Harlem in the early twentieth century, the period when the arrival of migrants from the south and the West Indies transformed the neighbourhood into the Negro Mecca, the greatest black city in the world, this project focuses not on black artists and the black middle class, but on the lives of ordinary African New Yorkers. It does so primarily by using the case files of the Manhattan District Attorney, which reveal all manner of things that would not ordinarily be labelled ‘criminal’– streetlife, black language, music, family life – as well as evidence of the role of gambling, violence and confidence men in the black community.

Our analysis of this material pays particular attention to the spatial dimensions of black urban life, breaking new ground in the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to map cultural life. Those maps will also form the basis of a web site derived from our research.

• ARC Discovery Grant, 2003-2007

Digital Harlem: Everyday Life, 1915-1930 – a map-based web site (schedule to go live in late 2008)

Stephen Robertson, "Harlem Undercover: Vice Investigators, Race and Prostitution in the 1920s," Journal of Urban History (forthcoming 2009)

Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson and Graham White, "The Envelope, Please," in The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Pasts, Presents, Futures, eds James W. Cook, Lawrence Glickman, Michael O’Malley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2008)

Panel at the 2008 Conference of the Organization of American Historians, New York City, March 29, 2008

• Stephen Garton, When Black Kings and Queens Ruled in Harlem
• Stephen Robertson, Mapping Harlem: Everyday Life in a Digital Neighborhood
• Shane White, Everyday Violence in Harlem

Shane White, The Envelope, Please," Calhoun College, Yale University, New Haven, March 27, 2008.

Shane White, When Black Kings and Queens Ruled in Harlem, The Annenberg Lecture, University of Pennsyvlania, Philadelphia, March 24, 2008.

Shane White The Black Eagle of Harlem, History Department, University of Reading, March 12, 2008.

Shane White, When Black Kings and Queens Ruled in Harlem, American History Seminar Series, Institute for Historical Research at University College London, March 6, 2008.

Stephen Robertson, Digital Harlem: Mapping Everyday Life in the 1920s, Department of History Seminar, University of Sydney, October 22, 2007

Shane White, The Black Eagle of Harlem, Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Advent of American Mass Culture, 1890-1930, University of North Carolina, October 4-5, 2007

Shane White, The Envelope, Please, Australian and New Zealand American Studies Conference, Launceston, July 12, 2006

Stephen Robertson, Watching Harlem, Australian and New Zealand American Studies Conference, Launceston, July 12, 2006

Shane White, The Envelope, Please, Duke University, 2006

Shane White, The Envelope, Please, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2005

Shane White, The Envelope, Please, The State of Cultural History: A Conference in Honour of Lawrence Levine, 2005

Stephen Robertson, Harlem Undercover: Surveillance, Race and Nightlife in the 1920s, Department of History Seminar, University of Sydney, May 31, 2005.

The Black Metropolis project employs digital technology to integrate a range of sources – the case files of the Manhattan District Attorney, probation files, prison records, undercover investigations, social surveys, census schedules and the two major newspapers published in Harlem, The New York Age and The Amsterdam News – and to visualize and explore the spatial dimensions of everyday life in Harlem. It does so by means of the Digital Harlem site, which allows the mapping of the information gathered in a database

Whereas a traditional historical map is static, those in Digital Harlem have the advantage of being dynamic. The database can be searched for, and the interface can then map, particular places or types of location, events, where an individual lived his/her life, or moments in time – or any combination of such data. For example, we have generated maps of the sites of nightlife, assaults, the locations that feature in life of a black teenager – his homes, workplaces, where he played basketball, swam, and had sex with his girlfriend – and events that occurred in January 1925 (see image). Clicking on any of the icons of the map links you to the associated database record. When site is complete, and sufficient data to be useful has been added to the database, the site will become available to the public.

Both the database and the map interface were designed for us by Damien Evans of the Archaeological Computing Laboratory (ACL), and refined over a period of more than a year as we added data, integrated additional types of data and developed a clearer sense of what we could use the map to visualize and analyze. Andrew Wilson of the ACL created an overlay of building footprints for the map, which can be turned on and off, based on information in fire insurance maps from the 1920s and 1930s.