Carla Peterson provides a fascinating and thoughtful analysis of the elite black community in nineteenth-century New York in her recently published Black Gotham. Based on her own family history, focussing on her paternal great-grandfather, Philip White, and great-great-grandfather, Peter Guignon, both pharmacists in Lower Manhattan by 1865, Peterson suggests that the book “lies somewhere in between” a family memoir and a more traditional social history of New York City during this era (6). Educated businessmen, adhering to strict moral codes of propriety, and engaged in the political discourses of the period, those who counted themselves Black Gothamites (including Philip White and Peter Guignon) consisted of a small circle of men (and later women) who claimed a significant place within the lesser-known history of New York City where black voices have been mostly absent from the accepted historical record.

The book is divided into two parts, the first section focusses on Lower Manhattan from 1795 through the Civil War, while the second moves to Brooklyn, picking up the two men's stories in 1865 and ending in 1895 as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Peterson positions her grandfathers as having lived within concentric circles throughout their lifetimes, “each wider than the last” (28), consisting of immediate family and social relations, a more extensive African American community in New York, the city of Brooklyn itself, and wider still, as citizens of the American nation and also of the world. As anybody who has ever researched family history will testify, it can feel an awful lot like detective work, as fruitless searches lead up dead-end streets and chance findings take the researcher away from their original plans, yet often to more exciting and interesting conclusions. Peterson's book is so much more accessible because of the honesty with which she writes about those experiences and the consequent limitations of her work. Despite her endless digging, she admits that the histories of Peter Guignon and Philip White will never be complete because of the silences apparent in the historical records pertaining to black New York in this period; “‘the unwritten interior lives’ of nineteenth century Black Americans have been buried with them” (393). Yet this absence allows Peterson to engage in acts of historical imagination, breathing life and colour into their worlds, as she re-creates scenes from the lives of Guignon and White within their families, at church, and as they challenged the racial discriminations of the period and the scientific racism of the 1850s where “hateful caricatures poisoned the lives of Black Americans on a daily basis” (189).

Peterson's focus on her own family history does not prevent her from detailing the lives of others who were prominent in the history of black New York during this era. Connecting them to the wider struggle of the recognition of rights for African Americans across the nation, she weaves the life stories of those such as Alexander Crummell, Henry Highland Garnett, and various members of the Lorillard family into her own ancestors’ history, where they assumed significance as friends, business associates, and employers. Peterson also notes the central institutions that became the focus of social life for the black elite of Gotham, such as the St. Philip's Episcopal Church, originally located on Collect (later Centre) Street, in Lower Manhattan, and the Mulberry Street School in the notorious Five Points area of the city, “one of the earliest educational institutions for colored children,” which Peter Guignon attended along with classmates such as Crummell and James McCune Smith.

As historians we are all engaged in telling stories but real skill is required to make those meaningful and relevant to reader's lives and to re-create cites of cultural production. Peterson achieves this with ease, relating her family's history to the wider social currents and cultural discourses of nineteenth-century America, such as African American education and the struggle to attain and maintain schools for black students, racial tensions between and within immigrant groups, the role of women (black and sometimes white) in seeking improvements for black New Yorkers, and, of course, the political discourses and varied forms of resistance that structured the experiences of the black elite during this period. Peterson's monograph is a real achievement, reminding us of the many varied histories of New York City and the diverse number of African Americans who inhabited it during the pre-Harlem era who contributed to a wider story about America as a nation.