New York has always been a bellwether for the nation, representing both its brightest ambitions and its darkest fears. The Restless City is a short, readable history of New York City, from colonial times to the present, showing how the successes and struggles of the city reinforced each other to create a distinctly dynamic, shocking, and therefore influential city.
Organized around conventional time periods, each chapter provides an introduction to the era, followed by four or five mini-essays on different economic, political, social, or cultural conflicts that impacted NYC in that time period. This would make a great short text for a course on New York history, or on urban history and the development of the American city.