Quigley, David 1966-

PERSONAL:

Born 1966. Education: Amherst College, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1988; New York University, M.A., 1995, Ph.D., 1997.

ADDRESSES:

Office—History Department, Boston College, 21 Campanella Way, 140 Commonwealth Ave., Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3859. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

John Jay High School, Brooklyn, NY, social studies teacher and community outreach coordinator, 1988-91; New York Council for the Humanities, visiting scholar, 1993-97; New York University, New York, NY, visiting assistant professor and research scholar, 1997-98; Boston College, Boston, MA, 1998—, became associate professor and director of graduate studies.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Grants and fellowships from Amherst College, 1991-93, 1993-94, New York University, 1991-96, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 1996-97, Boston College, 1998, 1999-2003, 2001-02, 2002-03; Boston College teaching awards, 1999-2000, 2007; Gilder-Lehrman Fellowship in American History, 2001.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with David N. Gellman) Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race and Citizenship, 1777-1877, New York University Press (New York, NY), 2003.

(Editor, with James M. O'Toole) Boston's Histories: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. O'Connor, Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 2004.

Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction and the Making of American Democracy, Hill & Wang (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to works by others, including Slavery in New York (companion to exhibition), edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris, New Press, 2005; Encyclopedia of African-American History, Volume I, The Colonial world and the New Nation, edited by Graham Russell Hodges, Oxford University Press, 2006; and Globalizing American History, edited by Peter Stearns, American Historical Association, 2008. Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including the Journal of Policy History, American Nineteenth-Century History, Reviews in American History, New England Quarterly, New York History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Civil War History, Culturefront, and International Labor and Working-Class History.

SIDELIGHTS:

David Quigley has taught both graduate and undergraduate courses on the history of the nineteenth-century United States and on political and urban history. He is also the author and editor of a number of books, including, with David N. Gellman, Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race and Citizenship, 1777-1877. In 1821, the political leaders of New York met for more than two months to rewrite the state's constitution. The resulting document secured the right to vote for white men and only the wealthiest black men. While blacks living in New York were free of the yoke of slavery, the majority were not given the full rights of citizenship. This volume includes documents that represent a range of voices, including activists, newspaper editors, politicians and lawmakers, and leaders in the black community. Also included are speeches made at the constitutional convention, maps, illustrations, and a bibliographic essay.

Quigley is the editor, with James M. O'Toole, of Boston's Histories: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. O'Connor, a tribute to O'Connor, professor emeritus of history at Boston College. The historian is the author of volumes that document the history of Boston, the Catholic Church in Boston, and the Boston Irish. Essays by leading scholars celebrate O'Connor's more than half century of documenting the history of the city.

In Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction and the Making of American Democracy, Quigley offers a history of New York City during the Civil War years and the postwar era, during which the city helped shaped the national debate on class and race. A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote: "Quigley's look at Reconstruction history in an unexpected quarter is a welcome addition to the scholarly literature."

Quigley refers to Reconstruction as the "second founding of American democracy," according to Booklist contributor Margaret Flanagan. Reconstruction was a period most often associated with the South, but which greatly affected the North, and particularly New York City, where urbanization, industrialization, and economic changes evolved, and the ideas of freedom and equality were challenged and reshaped. Quigley contends that this period, from approximately 1863 to 1877, is particularly relevant to contemporary American politics. New York's black activists, trade unionists, bourgeois reformers, and suffragettes have a place in Quigley's history. He cites events that shaped New York and the country, including the New York Draft Riots of 1863 that occurred shortly after the Union victory at Gettysburg. Quigley describes them as "the worst incident of civil unrest in American history," wrote the Kirkus Reviews critic. One of the slogans used by the rioters was "Rich man's war, poor man's fight," and pro-Southern "Copperheads" in New York's Democratic Party saw to it that Republicans were blamed. Even they expressed no concern over the fact that New York's victory parade at the end of the Civil War was made up entirely of whites, while blacks were targeted in their homes and communities, suffering under a siege of white unrest. The Democrats of Tammany Hall saw Reconstruction merely as a way to open Southern ports so that the North could benefit from the defeat of the Confederacy.

Several groups are studied in this volume. Blacks, with the aid of the federal government, began to embrace their rights. Boston's Democratic Party dismissed the idea of full integration and supported programs, including Catholic schools, that benefited whites. The elite class opposed democracy for the masses, be they white or black, and the white working-class demanded public works jobs and feared the loss of power of their own votes as blacks gained theirs through the Fifteenth Amendment, although most working-class whites agreed that the role of government was to represent the masses of all races. Liberty had a different meaning for various groups. A working-class appeal for governmental help following the Depression of 1873 led to the Tompkins Square police riot of January 13, 1874, while the bourgeois, including elitists like Theodore Tilden and E.L. Godkin, felt liberty to be government protection of their dominance through decreased expenditures for the masses. There were New Yorkers who pressed for progressive change, but labor reform, suffrage, and civil rights were slow in coming as Reconstruction was followed by the Gilded Age.

Although History: Review of New Books contributor Steve Goodson felt Second Founding to be "a useful survey of the major actors and ideologies that competed for predominance in post-Civil War New York City," he felt that because of the short length of the book, at fewer than two hundred pages, "there is not enough space for Quigley to fully develop his arguments."

Ward M. McAfee reviewed the volume in the Historian, noting that because of its complexity and unhappy outcomes, Reconstruction is seldom given the attention in the classroom that might be allocated to the period. He wrote that this volume "is a work that greatly aids understanding of this pivotal era. Quigley's research relies on a wide variety of primary materials, is eminently readable, and should be of interest to the general reader as well as to professional historians."

Booklist contributor Margaret Flanagan concluded her review by commenting that Quigley's study "firmly ties the history of Reconstruction-era New York City to the contemporary American political landscape."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, December, 2004, Gerald W. McFarland, review of Second Founding: New York City, Reconstruction and the Making of American Democracy, p. 1575.

Booklist, February 15, 2004, Margaret Flanagan, review of Second Founding, p. 1023.

Choice, February, 2004, T.D. Beal, review of Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race and Citizenship, 1777-1877, p. 1141; December, 2004, T.D. Beal, review of Second Founding, p. 724; January, 2006, P.F. Field, review of Second Founding, p. 919.

Historian, fall, 2006, Ward M. McAfee, review of Second Founding, p. 598.

History: Review of New Books, fall, 2005, Steve Goodson, review of Second Founding, p. 4.

Journal of American Studies, April, 2007, Richard A. Hawkins, review of Second Founding, p. 230.

Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2004, review of Second Founding, p. 27.

Reference & Research Book News, May, 2004, review of Boston's Histories: Essays in Honor of Thomas H. O'Connor, p. 64.

ONLINE

David Quigley Home Page, http://www2.bc.edu/˜quigleda (April 19, 2008).

H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online,http://www.h-net.org/ (April 19, 2008), William Seraile, review of Second Founding; Kirsten Twelbeck, review of Second Founding.