In the e-seminar Ethnic New York, about classic New York ethnic neighborhoods for the eight-part series The History of the City of New York, Barzun Professor of History and Social Science Kenneth T. Jackson traces the settlement of Harlem as it took shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jackson, whose lectures about New York City history have been legendary at Columbia for over three decades, argues that what was unusual about the first migration of African Americans to Harlem in the early twentieth century was that it was a neighborhood of mostly new construction, while in many other cities, African Americans were forced into areas that were older and deteriorating.

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