A Stanza Salon

This year, we launched our salon series, with a jam-packed event for the launch of our 2025 Beacon Literary Scene anthology. Now, we’re back with author Jonathan Ezra Goldman, in conversation about his new book Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York.

Tix: $5

Your $5 ticket counts toward the purchase of Jonathan's book at the event.

Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York offers a fresh look at 1920s New York City, unearthing stories of everyday life and marginalized communities. In sections that intertwine entertainment, politics, art, technology, crime, shopping, eating, and recreation, the book portrays sweeping events such as the Harlem Renaissance, Prohibition, and immigration reform through anecdotes of individual experiences that counter the era's popular conceptions of ballooning wealth and uproarious celebration. Jonathan Ezra Goldman's whirlwind tour of early 1920s New York City visits an all-female police platoon, a Black amusement park shut down before it opened, an Arabic literary salon, socialist Puerto Rican cigar factories, Chinatown funerals, lesbian cafes, overcrowded jails, toxic dumps, and Ku Klux Klan recruitment offices. The grand narratives of the 1920s interweave with little-known anecdotes about well-known figures such as Marcus Garvey, Dorothy Parker, and Babe Ruth, serving as a backdrop to the everyday challenges and triumphs of a city beset by crowds, automobile traffic, and rapidly changing technology and urban infrastructure, as well as erased stories of injustices like Jim Crow practices, immigration anxieties, and the violent treatment of political dissent. These stories still resonate today, showing that this dizzying, exuberant ride through hidden history can help twenty-first readers see our own moment more clearly.

Jonathan Ezra Goldman, he/him (Professor, Department. of Humanities, New York Institute of Technology), is author of Hidden Histories of Jazz Age New York from the Suppressed to the Strange, and Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity (University  of Texas Press 2011), editor of Joyce and the Law (University Press of Florida 2017), and co-editor of Modernist Star Maps (Routledge 2010). He has published widely about nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture, directs the digital project, NY 1920s: 100 Years Ago Today, When We Became Modern and is president of the James Joyce Society.