Topic: Printing New York City

Catalog description

This course explores New York City’s long history as a media center that shaped readerships, genres, social movements, and media practices. Through site visits and walks through the city, explorations of digital and physical archives, experiments with digital mapping and data visualization, and discussions of understudied and familiar texts, we will contemplate the competing voices, ideas, and possibilities that circulated in New York City’s print culture in the past—and that can help us to gain insight into our own period of media change today. We will consider the technologies employed in early print shops at the Seaport and along Printing House Square. We will look for the ideas and innovations that powered the city’s nineteenth-century communities of print—which included the emerging mass press of Newspaper Row, as well as a thriving Black press and a Spanish-language publishing community with hemispheric reach. We will survey the range of literary institutions and news organizations since the twentieth century that have made their location in New York City part of their appeal to audiences large and small. Students will participate in place-based experiential learning and seminar-style discussions to develop new perspectives on New York City and its literature and other media of the past and present.