Outgrowing its remarkably shortlived location in midtown Manhattan, Columbia College moved uptown in the mid1890s, not only transforming itself into an urban university under university president Seth Low, but also creating an urban campus guided by Charles McKim, William Rutherford Mead, and Stanford White's master plan. The university became a major constituent of what would be described as New York's Acropolis on Morningside Heights. It was preceded in this endeavor by the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and St. Luke's Hospital, and it was soon joined by Barnard College, Teachers College, and Union Theological Seminary, among others. The arrival of the Interborough Rapid Transit Subway in 1904 spurred residential and retail development.

Few aspects of American military history have been as vigorously debated as Harry Truman's decision to use atomic bombs against Japan. In this carefully crafted volume, Michael Kort describes the wartime circumstances and thinking that form the context for the decision to use these weapons, surveys the major debates related to that decision, and provides a comprehensive collection of key primary source documents that illuminate the behavior of the United States and Japan during the closing days of World War II. Kort opens with a summary of the debate over Hiroshima as it has evolved since 1945. He then provides a historical overview of thye events in question, beginning with the decision and program to build the atomic bomb. Detailing the sequence of events leading to Japan's surrender, he revisits the decisive battles of the Pacific War and the motivations of American and Japanese leaders. Finally, Kort examines ten key issues in the discussion of Hiroshima and guides readers to relevant primary source documents, scholarly books, and articles.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Book • When Ohio-born Pru Steiner arrives in New York in 1976, she follows in a long tradition of young people determined to take the city by storm. But when she falls in love with and marries Spence Robin, her hotshot young Shakespeare professor, her life takes a turn she couldn’t have anticipated. Thirty years later, something is wrong with Spence. The Great Man can’t concentrate; he falls asleep reading The New York Review of Books. With their daughter, Sarah, away at medical school, Pru must struggle on her own to care for him. One day, feeling especially isolated, Pru meets a man, and the possibility of new romance blooms. Meanwhile, Spence’s estranged son from his first marriage has come back into their lives. Arlo, a wealthy entrepreneur who invests in biotech, may be his father’s last, best hope. Morningside Heights is a sweeping and compassionate novel about a marriage surviving hardship. It’s about the love between women and men, and children and parents; about the things we give up in the face of adversity; and about how to survive when life turns out differently from what we thought we signed up for.

A Storm Foretold: Columbia University and Morningside Heights, 1968 offers an eyewitness account of the famous confrontation between Columbia and its surrounding community, one of the pivotal civil rights battles that characterized the sixties. Focused from the point of view of urban planning, author and urban historian Christiane Crasemann Collins provides firsthand insight into a preeminent institution's racially motivated tactics. With extensive research, architectural maps, and photos of the protests, A Storm Foretold shows how the university pursued the goal of creating an exclusive white acropolis on the Hudson, justified as a "need for expansion." Beginning with a plan to acquire properties on Morningside Heights, and then to empty them of "undesirable" tenants, a planned cordon sanitaire was intended to blockade the campus against the presumed alien territory of the surrounding neighborhoods, including areas in West Harlem and Morningside Park. In 1968, ignoring growing community opposition, Columbia began construction of a gymnasium next to an athletic field the university had shared with the community since the 1950s at the southern end of the scenic park. Collins' story might be titled, "Morningside Park: A Civil Rights Battle Ground" as grassroots opposition by the multi-racial community grew vigorous. Long angered by an intentionally decimating housing policy, and using "Gym Crow" as the symbol of Columbia's racist policy, community residents, students, and African-American organizations united to call for an end to the gymnasium's "invasion" of public open space. A Storm Foretold brings alive the institutional insensitivity and arrogance that ignited the civil rights movement in Morningside Heights, and the issues Collins presents are as relevant today as they were in the sixties.

This volume charts the architectural trajectory of Columbia University in New York City and celebrates the centennial of architect Charles Follen McKim's enduring vision of a spatially unified, architecturally integrated urban university.

In 1968–69, Columbia University became the site for a collision of American social movements. Black Power, student power, antiwar, New Left, and Civil Rights movements all clashed with local and state politics when an alliance of black students and residents of Harlem and Morningside Heights openly protested the school's ill-conceived plan to build a large, private gymnasium in the small green park that separates the elite university from Harlem. Railing against the university's expansion policy, protesters occupied administration buildings and met violent opposition from both fellow students and the police. In this dynamic book, Stefan M. Bradley describes the impact of Black Power ideology on the Students' Afro-American Society (SAS) at Columbia. While white students--led by Mark Rudd and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)--sought to radicalize the student body and restructure the university, black students focused on stopping the construction of the gym in Morningside Park. Through separate, militant action, black students and the black community stood up to the power of an Ivy League institution and stopped it from trampling over its relatively poor and powerless neighbors. Comparing the events at Columbia with similar events at Harvard, Cornell, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, Bradley locates this dramatic story within the context of the Black Power movement and the heightened youth activism of the 1960s. Harnessing the Civil Rights movement's spirit of civil disobedience and the Black Power movement's rhetoric and methodology, African American students were able to establish an identity for themselves on campus while representing the surrounding black community of Harlem. In doing so, Columbia's black students influenced their white peers on campus, re-energized the community's protest efforts, and eventually forced the university to share its power.

Following the tremendous success of her first book, a nonfiction work on housekeeping that became a surprise bestseller, Cheryl Mendelson brings to her debut novel the same intensely readable style that made Home Comforts so popular. In the spirit of Anthony Trollope, she roots her story very much in a specific time and place—1999, in an old-fashioned New York City neighborhood that’s becoming rapidly gentrified—and the enormously engaging result resembles a twentieth-century version of The Way We Live Now. Anne and Charles Braithwaite have spent their entire married life in a sedate old apartment building in Morningside Heights, a northern Manhattan neighborhood filled with intellectual, artistic souls like themselves, who thrive on the area’s abundant parks, cultural offferings, and reasonably priced real estate. The Braithwaites, musicians with several young children, are at the core of a circle of friends who make their living as writers, psychiatrists, and professors. But as the novel opens, their comfortable life is being threatened as a buoyant economy sends newly rich Wall Street types scurrying northward in search of good investments and more space. At the same time, the Braithwaites weather the difficult love lives of their friends, and all of the characters confront their fears that the institutions and social values that have until now provided them with meaning and stability—science, religion, the arts—are in increasing decline. Though the group clings to the rituals and promises of such institutions, the Braithwaites’ imminent departure sends shock waves through their community. As the family contemplates the impossible—a move to the suburbs—their predicament represents the end of a cultured kind of city life that middle-class families can no longer afford. This intelligent and captivating social chronicle is the first of a trilogy of novels about Morningside Heights; readers sure to be drawn in by Mendelson’s habit-forming prose have much more to look forward to.

This collection of short stories chronicles the life of a Japanese American born and raised on the edge of Harlem after his family moved to New York following internment during World War II. Set largely in the neighborhood near Columbia University, it provides a unique perspective of a multicultural community in transition, navigating the issues of identity, death, the Vietnam War, drugs, military duty, and coming of age as a minority in a time of turmoil. These well-crafted tales are told in Tsujimoto's poetic combination of New York street and elevated diction, reflecting the life of a high school dropout who eventually finds his way to college and a more fulfilling adult life.

For seven days in April 1968, students occupied five buildings on the campus of Columbia University to protest a planned gymnasium in a nearby Harlem park, links between the university and the Vietnam War, and what they saw as the university’s unresponsive attitude toward their concerns. Exhilarating to some and deeply troubling to others, the student protests paralyzed the university, grabbed the world’s attention, and inspired other uprisings. Fifty years after the events, A Time to Stir captures the reflections of those who participated in and witnessed the Columbia rebellion. With more than sixty essays from members of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the Students’ Afro-American Society, faculty, undergraduates who opposed the protests, “outside agitators,” and members of the New York Police Department, A Time to Stir sheds light on the politics, passions, and ideals of the 1960s. Moving beyond accounts from the student movement’s white leadership, this book presents the perspectives of black students, who were grappling with their uneasy integration into a supposedly liberal campus, as well as the views of women, who began to question their second-class status within the protest movement and society at large. A Time to Stir also speaks to the complicated legacy of the uprising. For many, the events at Columbia inspired a lifelong dedication to social causes, while for others they signaled the beginning of the chaos that would soon engulf the left. Taken together, these reflections present a nuanced and moving portrait that reflects the sense of possibility and excess that characterized the 1960s.