Free New York at War by Steven H. Jaffe

More Advance Praise for New York at War
    “Foreign foes have rarely attacked New York directly, but the city has been profoundly involved in the nation’s many military conflicts. As Steven Jaffe shows in this novel and absorbing study, Gotham has been banker and arsenal, staging ground and recruiting post, cheerleader and critic, fortification and tempting target. Seen in a series, the wartime experiences are strikingly different, and Jaffe respects each war story’s particularity. But he’s also good at spotting commonalities, the most intriguing being the way wars abroad become wars at home, with New York’s polyglot citizenry battling over a conflict’s legitimacy, or which combatant to back. Highly recommended.”
    —Mike Wallace, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Gotham
     
    “Anyone who’s ever lived in New York, or visited it, or thought about visiting it will be fascinated by this book. Even historians will be surprised by some chapters. Steven Jaffe has dug deep and come up with literary gold, again and again.”
    —Thomas Fleming, author of 1776: Year of Illusions
     
    “ New York at War provides a fascinating look at a forgotten aspect of the city’s history—its central role in so many of America’s military conflicts. Steven Jaffe brings this neglected aspect of New York’s past back to life with impressive insight and a great eye for the telling details that make history come alive.”
    —Tyler Anbinder, author of Five Points
     
    “Steven H. Jaffe’s vividly written narrative restores a crucial thread to the way we understand the history of New York City. In a highly readable style, New York at War tells a story of tenacity and endurance, and of social conflict on a grand scale. With a story filled with drama and the drum-beat of violence, culminating with the destruction of the World Trade Center, Jaffe has much to tell us about the way a city responds to crisis.”
    —Eric Homberger, author of The Historical Atlas of New York City
     
    “While most Americans probably see New York as America’s capital of finance and fashion, Steven Jaffe shows how the city has also been the nation’s epicenter during times of war. While New York may have profited from America’s many wars, it also proved the nation’s most vulnerable city, subject to attack both from without and from within. With an impressive span greater than that of the Brooklyn Bridge, New York at War reminds readers of Gotham’s centrality in America’s wartime experience from colonial times to 9/11. A great idea for a book, masterfully done.”
    —Edward P. Kohn, author of Hot Time in the Old Town

For Jill, Toby, and Matt



Introduction
    T his book evolved out of my experiences on September 11, 2001, and during the days and weeks that followed. On that sunny morning, I stood in a hillside park near my home, about fifteen miles west of lower Manhattan, watching the Twin Towers billowing black and gray smoke. “It’s time to bomb some mosques,” a distraught man standing on a nearby bench was yelling—this before al Qaeda was positively identified over the airwaves as the perpetrator of this act of war.
    At the time I was working as a historian and curator at the South Street Seaport Museum on the East River waterfront of lower Manhattan, an institution dedicated to preserving and interpreting New York’s four-hundred-year history as a place linked by sea to the rest of the world. When I finally returned to my office a week after the attacks, I encountered a traumatized landscape. The museum was located about seven blocks from the World Trade Center site, and the air at that distance was full of an acrid smell from the fires that continued to burn in the ruins of the complex. A light gray dust covered many façades, even this far from Ground Zero. “Rebuild,” someone had scrawled with an index finger in the dust of a table outside a shuttered restaurant. On the street in front of my office door, usually a