History
Edwin Burrows
Distinguished Professor
History
Brooklyn College
503s Whitehead Hall
2900 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11210
(718) 951-5000 x2808
eburrows@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Edwin Burrow's Website
A Distinguished Professor of History at Brooklyn College, Edwin Burrows’ research has focused on 18th century America, the American Revolution and the history of New York City. Recently he completed a book about the 30,000 Americans taken prisoner by the British during the Revolutionary War, the vast majority of whom were detained in and around New York City under impoverished conditions. Concentrating on New York City, his research has also focused on Brooklyn history. Among other organizations, Burrows has collaborated with the Old Stone House in Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Historical Society.
Books and publications about Brooklyn/New York City in the last 5 years:
- "The Gibraltar of America." New York 400. Museum of the City of New York. (Books and Publications: Chapter) 2009
- Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War (Basic Books) 2008
- "New York City." The Encyclopedia of New York State. Ed. Peter S. Eisenstadt. Lead article. Syracuse. 1062-77. (Books and Publications: Other Article) 2005
- "Kings County." The Other New York: The American Revolution Beyond New York City. Eds. Joseph S. Tiedemann and Eugene R. Fingerhut. 1062-77. (Books and Publications: Chapter) 2005
Edwin Burrows' Brooklyn College Faculty Profile
Philip Napoli
Assistant Professor
History
Brooklyn College
514a Whitehead Hall
2900 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11210
(718) 951-5000 x2809
pnapoli@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Philip Napoli's Website
Assistant Professor of History, Philip Napoli’s research has included interviews with over a hundred Brooklyn residents for a book on New York City’s relationship to the Vietnam War. Napoli has worked with the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Harbor Defense Museum, the Old Stone House, the Lott house, the Wyckoff House, Council of People's Organizations, the Flatbush YMCA, City Lore, Fraunces Tavern Museum and the Coney Island History Project.
Books and publications about Brooklyn/New York City in the last 5 years:
- New York's Vietnam: An Oral History, Hill and Wang. (Books and Publications: Forthcoming Publications) 2008
Phillip Napoli's Brooklyn College Faculty Profile
Jocelyn Wills
Associate Professor
History
Brooklyn College
525s Whitehead Hall
2900 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11210
(718) 951-2812
jwills@brooklyn.cuny.edu
An Associate Professor of History at Brooklyn College, Jocelyn Wills is an American economic, social, and urban historian whose research and scholarship focuses on the everyday lives of ordinary American strivers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her current research employs Brooklyn, New York as a site for testing American assumptions about mobility and small-business proprietorship in the post-Civil War United States. Wending her way through the 22 surviving Brooklyn and Kings County volumes of R.G. Dun’s credit reporting ledgers (contained at the Baker Library, Harvard Business School) for the years 1856-1893, Wills has assembled a database of more than 780 ordinary, petite-storefront operators who provided various neighborhoods with clothes, drugs, dry and fancy goods, groceries, hardware, liquor, stationery, tea, tobacco, and other goods offered by the many retail outlets that popped up to service Brooklyn’s local economy. Now following these people and their offspring backward and forward in time, Wills has discovered in the extraordinary experiences of ordinary people a host of complicated narratives about upward, lateral, and downward mobility, of personal and business triumphs turned tragic, about separation and divorce, and of the ways in which the terrain of capitalist expansion constantly shifted under people’s feet. She is currently turning some of this research into article-length pieces. Longer term, she plans to write a book-length cultural history of capitalism focused on the contingencies and complexities of American economic striving and social constructions of success, failure, mobility, and gender expectations.
Among other courses at Brooklyn College, Wills teaches Brooklyn History. She also employs elements of the local to understand the global in all of her courses, which include American Dreams & Realities, The Peopling of New York, Comparative Industrialization, American Economic History, Sex, Power, and Money, and The Shaping of the Modern World. Her students’ research projects often center on Brooklyn/New York City, and she tries in all courses to incorporate walking tours, visits to sites of history making and memory, and at least one or two assignments that force students to act locally and think globally. In spring 2011, all of her student research projects will center on the history of Brooklyn College, particularly the native-born and immigrant students who enrolled at City University of New York to improve their chances for American mobility, and those who participated in activism to secure their democratic right to an affordable public education.
Wills has collaborated with the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Green-Wood Historic Fund, the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, the Old Stone House, Weeksville Heritage Society, the Shirley Chisholm Project, St. John's Bread and Life, the Brooklyn Public Library, CityLore, and the Department of Education's Teaching American History Summer Institute. Additional collaborations include a recent Learning Community--with Brooklyn College Assistant Professor Brett Branco--focused on the "Future of the Gowanus Canal."
Books and publications about Brooklyn/New York City in the last 5 years:
- Wills, Jocelyn. “The Gilded-Age ‘Smash-Up’: Personal Relationships, Financial Entanglements, and Small Business Failure in 19th-Century Brooklyn” (in progress) 2010
- Wills, Jocelyn. "Struggling Upward Without Luke Larkin's Luck: Re-Examining Mobility in Post-Civil War Brooklyn," Markets in Time and Place: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Capitalism and Power. (Books and Publications: Forthcoming Publications) 2010
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