"The founders of the acclaimed Big Onion Walking Tours outline 10 historical walks in their home borough, from America's first pencil factory to Bedford-Stuyvesant's beautiful row houses to Coney Island."--"San Francisco Chronicle,"

Visit the Big Onion Guide to New York City site at www.nyupress.org/bigonion

"One could scarcely find a more informative and engaging guide than this book, distilled from the award-winning tours developed over the last decade by Big Onion Walking Tours...It is a delight, deeply knowledgeable, presented with wit and style. Would that more historians engage the public so well."
-- "New York History," Spring 2002

Whether you're a tourist or a native New Yorker, you will appreciate this witty, informative walking guide to New York City, as authors Seth Kamil and Eric Wakin peel back the layers of New York's most popular neighborhoods. Here in one volume are their award-winning tours. In their "Immigrant New York" tour you can take a walk on the Bowery, the most infamous street in the city and learn how the city's finest roadway became America's "Skid Row." In "Before Stonewall" you'll discover the many facets of gay and lesbian history and trace the development of Greenwich Village as a cultural mecca. From SoHo to the Upper West Side; from Harlem to Brooklyn there's something in The Big Onion Guide for everyone.

The authors show how it was nothing new when Mayor Giuliani was unable to ban sales by immigrant mobile food vendors. The Guide takes us to the place where the Dutch tried to ban street side sales by Scottish peddlers 350 years ago, and where the great Fiorello La Guardia banned most of the pushcart salesmen at midcentury.

But Kamiland Wakin are not nostalgists or preservationists. Instead, their historical tours connect today's city with the snapshots of yesterday, blending social and cultural history with the evolution of different ethnic and cultural communities.

The Big Onion Guide includes ten walking tours, plus a 5-borough driving tour, peppered with informative sidebars, illustrations, and photos from the collection at the New-York Historical Society.

As perhaps never before in its extraordinary history, New York has captured the American imagination. This major anthology brings together not only the best literary writing about New York -- from O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Paul Auster, and James Baldwin, among many others -- but also the most revealing essays by politicians, philosophers, city planners, social critics, visitors, immigrants, journalists, and historians.

The anthology begins with an account of Henry Hudson's voyage in 1609 and ends with an essay written especially for this book by John P. Avlon, former Mayor Rudolph Guiliani's speechwriter, called "The Resilient City," on the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center as observed from City Hall. The editors have chosen some familiar favorites, such as Washington Irving's "A History of New York" and Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," as well as lesser-known literary and historical gems, such as Frederick Law Olmsted's plan for Central Park and Cynthia Ozick's "The Synthetic Sublime" -- an updated answer to E. B. White's classic essay "Here Is New York," which is also included. The variety and originality of the selections in Empire City offer a captivating account of New York's growth, and reveal often forgotten aspects of its political, literary, and social history.

Including works from Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, Breton and Manx, this Celtic Miscellany offers a rich blend of poetry and prose from the eighth to the nineteenth century, and provides a unique insight into the minds and literature of the Celtic people. It is a literature dominated by a deep sense of wonder, wild inventiveness and a profound sense of the uncanny, in which the natural world and the power of the individual spirit are celebrated with astonishing imaginative force. Skifully arranged by theme, from the hero-tales of Cu Chulainn, Bardic poetry and elegies, to the sensitive and intimate writings of early Celtic Christianity, this anthology provides a fascinating insight into a deeply creative literary tradition. Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson was born in 1909. He began his career as a lecturer in Celtic at Cambridge, before becoming the first chair of the Department of Celtic Language and Literature at Harvard. He undertook war service with the Uncommon Languages section of British censorship and subsequently held professorships at Harvard and Edinburgh. Professor Jackson died in 1991.

As perhaps never before in its extraordinary history, New York has captured the American imagination. This major anthology brings together not only the best literary writing about New York -- from O. Henry, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Paul Auster, and James Baldwin, among many others -- but also the most revealing essays by politicians, philosophers, city planners, social critics, visitors, immigrants, journalists, and historians.

The anthology begins with an account of Henry Hudson's voyage in 1609 and ends with an essay written especially for this book by John P. Avlon, former Mayor Rudolph Guiliani's speechwriter, called "The Resilient City," on the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center as observed from City Hall. The editors have chosen some familiar favorites, such as Washington Irving's "A History of New York" and Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," as well as lesser-known literary and historical gems, such as Frederick Law Olmsted's plan for Central Park and Cynthia Ozick's "The Synthetic Sublime" -- an updated answer to E. B. White's classic essay "Here Is New York," which is also included. The variety and originality of the selections in Empire City offer a captivating account of New York's growth, and reveal often forgotten aspects of its political, literary, and social history.

First published in 1935, this volume by Kenneth Jackson examines the different types of nature poetry that were produced in Ireland and Wales up to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The work is divided into two parts. The first part contains the texts of the Irish and Welsh poems, translated into English and edited with notes. The second part offers a critical analysis of the poems, drawing comparison to the literature of other cultures such as Anglo-Saxon, and considering what sort of people composed the poems and what their purpose was. This volume, which has long been out of print, will be welcomed by medievalists as well as enthusiasts of Irish and Welsh poetry.

The Book of Deer, 43 folios of manuscript, containing parts of the Gospels and the Apostles' Creed, is one of the treasures of the Cambridge University Library. The Book is important not so much for its primary contents as for the notes in Gaelic which have been added to it in some of the available blank spaces. These notes record the foundation 'myth' of the monastery of Deer in north-east Aberdeenshire, and formal recordings of various grants of lands to the monastery. The language in which the notes are written is the form of Gaelic spoken in Buchan during the earlier part of the twelfth century, which means that this manuscript predates the next earliest surviving Scots Gaelic documents by almost three centuries. Professor Jackson presents a diplomatic text of the notes, based on a careful study of the original manuscript, together with an edited text, a translation, discussion, notes and a glossary.

"The Almanac of New York City" is an innovative companion for urban enthusiasts. Nowhere else will you find the name of the city's first comptroller (Selah Strong) and Staten Island's most recently designated historic district (Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto) next to the city's best-attended cultural institution (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, with five million visitors annually) and its lowest recorded temperature (15 degrees below zero in February 1934). "The Almanac" identifies the borough with the most residents who relocate to Palm Beach (Queens) and the borough with the highest number of Panamanian immigrants (Brooklyn). It lists where New York currently ranks in the cost of apartment rentals, the rate of obesity in each borough, the details of executions dating back to 1639, per capita income by borough, the longest-running Broadway shows, the winners of the Wanamaker Mile, and the location of celebrated grave sites. Compiled by two longtime historians of the city, "The Almanac" treats readers to a real New York story, a tale that will delight anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the Big Apple's complex core.