Read all about our Salon Series here.
“Less rows of chairs, more community gathering”
Each Salon is $5. And your $5 entry comes off the price of any visiting authors’ books you purchase at an event.
Bring your brain! We’ll always have free snacks to keep you powered up.
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.
Adam McKible is Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he teaches American and African American literature. He is the author of Circulating Jim Crow (2024) and The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York (2002), and he edited and introduced Edward Christopher Williams’s When Washington Was in Vogue (2004). He is also co-editor of Jim Crow Modernism (2026), special issues of the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies (2025) and Modernism/modernity (2013), and of the collection, Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (2005).