A Moment in the Sun: Black Manhattan Before the Civil War

A Moment in the Sun dispels the pernicious narrative that in New York City, slavery was followed by a hundred years of poverty and destitution.

Dispelling the persistent narrative that abject poverty followed the end of slavery in New York City, acclaimed historian Shane White finally sets the historical record straight. A Moment in the Sun, a revisionist and immersive retelling of antebellum Manhattan, depicts a long-forgotten, nineteenth-century era when ordinary Black men and women, now ...