Episode 151: Gangs of New York with Tyler Anbinder

Reckoning with Jason Herbert

This week Tyler Anbinder joins in to talk about his experiences advising on Gangs of New York as well as his work tracing the Irish diaspora.

About our guest:

Tyler Anbinder is a specialist in nineteenth-century America and the history of immigration and ethnicity in American life. His latest book, published in March 2024 by Little, Brown, is entitled Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York. That project's digital history component, created with research assistance from more than two dozen GW students, can be found at http://beyondragstoriches.org. His most recent book before Plentiful Country was City of Dreams (2016), a history of immigrant life in New York City from the early 1600s to the present. And prior to that, in 2001, he published Five Points, a history of nineteenth-century America's most infamous immigrant neighborhood, focusing in particular on tenement life, inter-ethnic relations, and ethnic politics. His first book, Nativism and Slavery (1992), analyzed the role of the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know Nothing party in the political crisis that led to the Civil War. Professor Anbinder has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and held the Fulbright Thomas Jefferson Chair in American History at the University of Utrecht. He has received awards for his scholarship from the Organization of American Historians, the Columbia University School of Journalism, and the journal Civil War History. He also served as a historical consultant to Martin Scorsese for the making of The Gangs of New York.