Research At The National Archives And Beyond!

Learn how Cluster Research helped to unravel the history of a family in 19th Century New York! Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City Yale UP, 2011- is a social and cultural history of African Americans in nineteenth-century New York City as seen through the lens of family history.  It was awarded the 2011 NYC Book Award in History from the New York Society Library and was a finalist for the 2012 Gilder-Lerhman Institute Frederick Douglass Prize.   In connection with the publication of Black Gotham, Peterson has appeared on C-SPAN Book TV. Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative, Black Gotham is Carla L. Peterson’s riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors from youth to adulthood.  Her book challenges many of the accepted “truths” about African American history, including the assumption that the phrase “19-century black Americans” means enslaved people, that “New York State before the Civil Wa