New York City During the Revolutionary War! -With Peter Aigner

0:00Hello, everyone, and welcome to The New Yorker. It's a podcast by New York City Cop. I'm your host, Kelly Copp, published photographer, New York City tour business owner, content creator, podcaster, and above all else, a New Yorker. Ladies and gentlemen, the next book looks about, Trace is now high. Stand clear of the closing doors, please.

0:35This is a time square. This is a time square. With me today, my friends, I have NYC historian Peter Eigner. He is the director of the Gotham Center for New York City History and the co-founder of Echoes of Revolution NYC, a new immersive walking tour experience that uses geolocation to put you in the world of historic New York. But above all else, Peter is a New Yorker. Hey, Peter, how are you doing today? Welcome to the show. I'm great. It's good to see you again. So I want to make sure I'm saying this correctly. It's Peter Eigner. Yeah, Peter Eigner. Doctor, you're also a doctor, right? I had to get a PhD maybe not maybe not the smartest decision I ever made why is that oh it's a long grueling process is that how long does it take well I my experience was maybe a little longer than the average but I mean I it takes at least seven years I think that is the kind of wow yeah so I mine went a little bit slower for a bunch of reasons that you know I think we're justified but but yeah a long time and then you you're kind of doing it typically at a time of life where you're watching other people kind of you know get married move up in their careers buy houses do all that kind of like stuff and then you're just kind of like i'm still i'm still working on my dissertation that's a that's pretty impressive though you know i uh i wanted to i didn't actually expect that i would have a career in academia i was warned by the guy that i um went to when i I said I wanted to do it, that, you know, there's no jobs in academia.

2:24And that was back in the, that was before the crash. Right. So it was really something that I just kind of wanted to do for myself. I knew I could kind of do it without going into bad debt or anything like that. So it's been a very sort of happy surprise. That's still pretty impressive. Yeah. You know, I know we jumped up to you becoming a Dr. Peter Eigner, but tell us when you, you know, where you were born. Sure. and um tell us about you growing up here in new york city yeah so how would you were you born here in new york i was yeah okay cool queen's boy oh nice i didn't know that yeah yeah ridgewood very cool yep um uh myrtle and summerfield um shout out to ridgewood and um yeah my uh my dad grew up in ridgewood too um uh they were both uh my grandparents uh came over here and they He was a contractor.

3:17He was doing kind of, they labor contract stuff. She was like doing seamstress stuff. And then long story short, they ended up taking over this chocolate shop. Nice. My dad ended up doing the same thing. So there was one in Ridgewood and there was one in Forest Hills. Forest Hills one's still around. Actually, it's three years away from its 100th anniversary. Wow. And they just opened up a kiosk in JFK. So if you see my name, uh, on some chocolate boxes in JFK. That's, that's, that's pretty associated anymore, but that was us for a very long time. Still pretty cool. Your name is in, you know, New York history right there too.

3:57We, yeah, I mean, we, it was, you know, I don't know, 50 years, 60 years, something like that. And, you know, I mean, you know, how hard it is to have a business in the city. So, um, you know, uh, yeah, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm, I'm very pleased that it's still around because you know I grew up every weekend I was um I was in Queens I was about 10 and then we were out in Long Island but you know every single weekend every vacation every summer I was working in that shop so I've always kind of I've always kind of been in the city and then I've never lived more than two years outside of New York so that's interesting that's really interesting and so you're a child growing up here in Queens you said from since you're historian now yeah you know did were there glimpses and interest at a young age of history or were you just a regular child and you know doing your thing causing trouble yeah you know skateboarding nintendo all that um i um i think that the genesis of me being a historian was that it was kind of a thing for my dad and my grandfather and you know young boy you want to kind of have your place among the men and so there was a bit of a sort of uh you know that was the coin at the dinner table um history and politics and you know i i'm a political historian um so so you know in some psychological way that i'm not sure i want to totally unpack i'm sure that's kind of how it happened yeah yeah well this podcast is also is about you unpacking all this oh great okay wonderful I'll just, I'll just, you know, yeah, I just won't listen to it.

5:36So then you, you know, you grew up in Queens. You moved to Long Island. Yeah. Did you like Long Island? How far, where were you? Oh, I mean, I hated it when I was a teenager, but I mean, I don't know if that was just because I was a teenager, but it's a beautiful town and Glen Cove on the North Shore. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know Long Island that well. Oh, it's really, yeah. It's really, it's not far from, you know, from Forest Hills. It's like maybe 40 minutes or something like that. Near Oyster Bay and all that. um beautiful on the water and um so you know my friends and i were always kind of down at the beaches they're not the best beaches but the you know hanging out at the beaches at the weekends and night night and um yeah it's very green and and beautiful parks um uh it's part of the old gold coast so you know great gatsby days uh before when long island was basically just farmland um uh long island was for centuries like the breadbasket for new york city and and for for places much further actually even beyond the region um very fertile land um that with the rise of you know petrochemical farming and such like became less important and so all those i mean it's not just new york right like the sort of surrounding area outside of most cities was like very sort of fertile soil and that's kind of why those places got placed nice usually along rivers and um but then we figure out how to kind of like turn oil into like a way to infuse the ground with nitrogen we don't need as much anyway long story short like we get mass suburbanization so yeah but like but in the days of gatsby in the 20s and 1920s um it's called the gold coast because all those sort of like big golden uh gilded age uh robber barons or captains of ministry had like 1890s i'm guessing yeah exactly yeah limited no no you're You got it right.

7:241890s to 1920s. I love that era. Before and after. Yeah. You know, from what I've seen on TV and everything and movies, I'm sure there's a lot of not so beautiful parts about it. I mean, you know. Like health care. Yes. Yeah. I mean, this age is called the second Gilded Age, right? So there are parallels. It must have been quite something to be in Long Island at that time. again most of the most of the island is just kind of farmland and then you've got these big mansions right that's what I was envisioning yeah which is part of the reason why the Long Island Railroad went out there ah good to know I didn't know that for sure yeah yeah also Forest Hills here in the city where I lived at the shop I can definitely see that yeah you know when I think of the Gilded Age too I also think of Fifth Avenue sure yeah yeah wasn't the Vanderbilt Mansion where Bergdorf's is now or am i mistaken uh i'm not exactly sure on that but fifth was like you know the the you can kind of trace the uh years ago i did this thing with the um i can't remember the name of it it's like france's version of npr um they were doing a thing on fifth you know um there's several books just on the history of fifth avenue you can kind of trace the development of the city um and kind of by extension the country because and this is a thing we kind of often say it at the place that i run um the gotham center the only academic center right in new york city history um that uh you know new york is kind of the best lens to understand u.s history because um it's the unofficial capital the economic headquarters of the country which means kind of it's headquarters for everything else kind of downstream so anyway so you know those we're talking about these these people who lived on the on the on the gold coast long island of course those who are like you know they're not just local big names they're like national and international big names it's rockefeller it's vanderbilt exactly you know um and yeah so so they they had uh mansions in the city that the kind of and as the city sort of expanded from the lower tip of manhattan where it starts fifth avenue kind of creeps up and um and the sort of the northern edge of it is always kind of where those mansions are until they start splitting off into places out in long island or or like places like, uh, um, uh, not Grodin, but, um, Greenwich and Connecticut and another place, Westchester and such.

9:47Um, so yeah, so, so a lot of those, uh, places that have now been repurposed for department stores and such were originally mansions, right? So, um, I, I work, the Gotham Center is part of the CUNY graduate school. Tell people what the Gotham Center is. Yeah. What you do and every two. Right. So I, I, I'm the director at the Gotham Center. it's uh like a it's the only academic center devoted to new york city history it was started by mike wallace who's like where is it though i'm sorry it's 35th and 5th okay um and we're literally inside the old uh um b altman's building oh nice the luxury department store right yeah beautiful building um and um it's a block away from penn station if people that were kind of thinking that yeah and um uh the the organization just celebrated its 25th year um it was started by mike wallace who's like the historian of new york city mike um just finished his trilogy um it's each book's like 1200 pages he's kind of master nobody will ever do what he did it's just insane kind of project um uh and very much kind of of its time mike came up mike was doing his dissertation in the in the in in the 60s under richard hofstetter who was like again kind of like arguably the historian of the united states time very famous man and taught at columbia and um you know it's it's you probably maybe heard people kind of this phrase about like you know history is kind of a bunch of dead white guys that that was kind of that was kind of like in a very literal sense what it was that yeah yeah because if you if you um you know and my my friends and i who are starting to always kind of marvel at this ourselves we look back at like the the big books of that period there's like nothing by way of citations they're like you know because it's so interesting yeah and it's not just because they're like now with digital tech we can kind of like access so much more research and all that it's also that there just weren't as many academics Like, um, you know, before the GI bill, 0.5%, right?

11:55Half of a percent of population went to college. And so by extension, you only didn't really have that many professors and you didn't have that much by way of kind of research. Um, and it tended to privilege very powerful people and focused on like diplomats and presidents and, and, and those sorts of things. And so there were like just vast swaths of history that like just weren't done. And then in part because folks are getting their PhDs, like part of that sort of post-GI bill, they're getting their PhDs as college is expanding and moving towards a service-based economy. Right. And everyone kind of needs to get a college degree.

12:33So you've got more people not just going to college, but getting PhDs, becoming professors, becoming historians. and they're doing it in the 60s when you know it's like this plethora of movements social movements and all of a sudden people want you know like want to know about the history of native americans they want to know about the history of women they want to know about the history of black americans they want to know about the history of you know everything everything yeah and and so um mike was the editor of a journal that um that was sort of publishing this new research um and he realized kind of quickly that they were literally kind of rewriting the whole history of the country um like the history that we know is because of this period and um but it was really rewriting a lot of what what that generation kind of thought was the history of the country and um so he had the idea to do a history of the u.s originally and he jokes and i don't think that it's really a joke that he was like 3 000 pages in they weren't out of the 1700s yet and so he kind of took a couple years just like a little depressed and then kind of figured out like, well, if I do the history of New York, it's more manageable.

13:39And then it kind of works the same way because again, like I said, New York is the, it's the economic headquarters. And so all of these kinds of national figures, like if you read our textbooks, right. If you read a kind of standard U S history textbook, New York is so privileged. And I'm sure that there are people in the rest of the country that, that, that feeds into the kind of resentment about New York. But, you know, I would say, you know, like having grown up here too, like I, I don't feel the need to really like beat my chest and I'm going to probably do this later when I talk about the revolution or whatever.

14:08But like, I, you know, like it's just, it's not, it's not about, uh, you know, we're better because, you know, there's something in the water or the culture or something. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like we're, it's the New Yorkers podcast. So I'm happy to, you know, but like, but it's really, you know, like, because it is, it is, you know, it's like what Rome was back in ancient Rome or it's what London was in the British empire, you know, like, you know, I have a question. I've never asked anybody who you're, you know, obviously we're born here and grew up here in New York city. What is it like for you to leave the city, say on vacation, just anywhere in the country?

14:43And, and, you know, what was it like you leaving this area the first time as a child and then traveling somewhere else? I'm like, wow, this is not New York city. Like, what was that to you? Cause it's the opposite for most people where they come from these small towns or any town and they come to any city, New York sitting there blown away. Yeah. What's the opposite feeling? Yeah. I mean, I have, I have my brother-in-law comes from a very small town in Missouri. And like, he's like, I think kind of physically overwhelmed when he comes here and he's not some, you know, like lived in a shack in the woods.

15:12He's very well traveled and all that sensory overload. But it is, you know, it's like kind of sensory overload. And, uh, you know, in, in part, the experience is that like, I have the inverse of that where like I go to places and, and now I've kind of aged into a point where like, um i like actually having like quiet and solitude and right kind of stuff but if i think about like where i would live yeah where would that be i don't know i mean i i i used to answer that question and say yeah i mean it's here yeah you know um but um i used to say like it's kind of hard to imagine um in the u.s because you know i don't want to ruffle anybody's feathers but We used to have great cities, right?

16:00Yeah. And we have, there's a lot of great cities out there besides New York. But like the thing about New York that's really distinct still, it's like, it's like, it's urban in a way that I don't think those other places are. Like my experience of going to other places, other cities in this country is always just kind of like how kind of suburban it is, how like non-really walkable they are. I mean, 100 % agree with you though. Yeah. You know, I go home to Florida. Yeah. and it's just it's just not you know i lived in orlando for 20 some years and i love it don't get me wrong it's my second heart yeah after new york now or new york and but it's just not the same it's just not that walking like to walk you can walk anywhere in this city i don't care where it is any borough you know farther out of the boroughs you can walk that's what we do you know No other city really does that.

16:50This is a little bit beyond my ken to kind of explain, but sociologists would tell you a lot about just how the stoop life and that walkability of a city, things like mass transit, which we used to have a lot of, right? I was gesturing at that period of mass suburbanization after World War II, and during that period, people don't know this, but 300 cities dismantled their mass transit systems, you know and we became this utterly car dependent culture um you know you said 300 cities yeah that's really interesting i'd like to read more about that there's there's a great book by a great historian uh historian named nick bloom um called um house i think it's called house states shape post-war america and there's a chapter in there on transportation where i'm pulling that citation up but there's a lot of you know mass suburbanization was was you know people totally take it for granted i i talk about it actually in the in the moynihan book we were talking earlier about i wrote a biography of daniel patch moynihan and that was actually his kind of first first big issue um and one that he actually tried um continually to make an impact with but you know he said and i'll quote him and say and because he's totally right that you know historians will and they and they do her servants will judge um the highway act which was this thing that heisenhower passed that made it very cheap for states to kind of start laying down highways everywhere as the single most revolutionary thing that changed, particularly the nature of urban life in the United States, but life in general.

18:23Economic, political, social life in this country was more transformed by the Highway Act than anything else, any other piece of legislation. Makes sense. I did not know this, though. When I go back to Orlando, too, are my parents in southwest Florida, there's really no public transportation at all to get around, so to speak. you know even from city to city it's challenging like here northeast corridor whatever we can go wherever we want you know but you said real quick you're writing a book can you tell us about it real quick you finished it i finished it it's coming out in march march 17th i believe 2027 yeah tell us about it so it'll be with simon schuster it's a biography of daniel patrick moynihan it'll be the first real biography of moynihan um and for anyone who doesn't know who Moynihan is um you know Moynihan was uh this uh you know just kind of this extraordinary figure in American political life he uh was the only person to serve at a high cabinet level four different presidents in a row um or I think period uh he uh then went on to serve four terms in the senate he's the person who Hillary Clinton got a seat from um he was the senator for New York um I did not know that.

19:38In addition, you know, this was a very big part of his career across this period. He was known as like the intellectual of the Senate, of Congress, of, you know, arguably of D.C. Yeah. You know, taught at Harvard. The joke was that he published more books than any sort of Senate, most senators had read. You know, 20, 20 some, 20 books, more or less. And, you know, half of which he kind of scoffed. He just scotched off like in a few weeks time while he was on recess from the Congress. And, you know, he is kind of this Forrest Gump-like figure in the sense that, like, you know, Gump is kind of always somehow at the center of, like, these major events in American history.

20:19So his life is really kind of the history of the country. He grows up here in the city in the Depression. I was going to ask you when he was born. Yeah. Yeah, he was born in 27. And so when this book comes out, it'll be, he'll have been 100 years old. That's why they picked the date. Oh, wow. Interesting, yeah. So I'd actually finished this book some time ago. but um timings yeah yeah so and uh he has a uh kind of a quite famous story because um his his his father's an alcoholic and a gambler and it leaves bans the family kind of at the height of depression and uh you know i don't need to kind of explain that that it's hard for a for a woman in the 1930s to to make it right particularly if she's got three kids um and so uh it really kind of scarred him in multiple ways um and it's quite important for the thing that he's probably most famous for which he writes this report in 1955 it's called the Moynihan report probably the the most widely cited cited government study of the 20th century um and um certainly not without controversy um i think people will be very surprised by what um i found and what i'll I'll say about what Moynihan's intentions and desires for the report.

21:33We got to have you back on the podcast to talk about your book. Happy to. But go ahead. Yeah. But Moynihan really kind of just ranged across domestic and foreign policy in this extraordinary career. It's not just the length, but it's the breadth and the depth of it. You know, like he was this kind of rare figure, you know, when he kind of retired, it's not actually necessarily something that becomes newsworthy. Right. But when he retired, it was kind of very newsworthy. that people were like, well, you know, how many Moynihans? And we're going to really kind of like notice this absence, right?

22:03Because he really is. And this was said when he died. I don't know if I said this already, but you know, he, when he died, several people said, you know, he really was kind of the last figure you can imagine in American politics, who was the kind of person that the founding fathers imagined would run the country. These kind of philosopher statesman people like hamilton madison john adams you know these kind of very like you know semi uh philosopher type you know really kind of intellectual uh you know not just kind of theorists but practitioners of government and politics um you know and uh yeah so he had a very extraordinary life um and you know it was a massive project the book is uh it's like 1500 hundred footnotes and it's 150 ,000 words without the footnotes.

22:56Uh, not exactly sure how many pages that is, but it's a, it's a big book and, and, but it's a huge life. And he, you know, his, his, his, uh, my primary database was his collection at the library of Congress. Um, I went to like a dozen archives, but, um, he has the largest single person collection at the library. His correspondence alone, it's 10 ,000 letters. Jeez. Yeah. Um, if you stacked it up against the Washington monuments, like three Washington monuments, you know? So it's like more than Jefferson and those guys. It's like, how long did it take you to write the book? You know, uh, a little over a decade.

23:32I wasn't always working on it, but a little over a decade. Yeah. Interesting. Can't wait for it to drop as they say nowadays. Right. As the kids say. Yeah. I love it. That's really, that's just really interesting. I can't wait to read it and talk about it more. and now let's talk about the reason you're here today too we're talking about the revolutionary war which people don't realize how much action was in new york city so tell us all about it and the app as well yeah yeah so um uh yeah new york was it's when you think of the revolution you think of boston boston tea party you know you know whatever tv shows us revolutionary war is boston great cities uh obviously important in the history of this country of this period um but we argue and i'll back this up a thousand ways uh that new york really is the the city at the heart of the american revolution it's really at the center of action from beginning to end in this period um and so we created a um there are lots of reasons why new york gets left out of that history we can talk about that later but yeah i do want to hear that we wanted to kind of use the 250th anniversary, which is happening July 4th, as a way to kind of recenter New York in the narrative.

24:54And people at the time understood it was central, but for various reasons it's been placed. And so we created a freedom trail because that's actually one of the reasons why Boston has kind of imprinted in our, in our minds. You know, when Boston created their trail in the fifties, they got as much as, or better to say as little tourism as we do around the revolution. and then within I think 15, 20 years, they had, they had grown at tenfold or more. Um, and, um, you know, we're, we've tried to do the same thing. We created, uh, this, uh, began first as a digital exhibition. Now it's a free app that you can download this minute called.

25:35And why, why is it important that it's free to you? Well, so, so I, I work at, so the Gotham center is sponsored by CUNY, which is New York city's public institution exactly and so everything we do is you know the tagline for cuny is at the graduate school is knowledge for the public good so so you know our job is to is to just kind of like promote the history the knowledge of the history of the city and um you know be like you know it's your tax dollars at work you know all of our stuff is free and it's all very high quality and um you know it exists accessible to everyone it's for the benefit of your life you know um Um, and so, and so we created this, we created this, uh, it's a, it was a website.

26:17There's like 75 ,000 words of text up there. Um, but then there's also like this audio. So you can do like 75 minutes of like a walk through lower Manhattan. So it's the same length as Boston. Oh, wow. Um, where is it from where to where? It starts down at Bowling Green and then ends at, uh, we kind of take people on a bit of a swirl and take them back to Francis Tavern. We wanted to kind of think about like places where they can stop and rest and have meals and such. Oh, that's nice. And how long did you say it takes? 75 minutes of audio. So the whole walk, you know, if you're doing it kind of briskly, especially we kind of thought of it as like a person would do it kind of on their own.

26:52You can do it however you want. Right. Right. And you can do it from home. So you don't actually have to do this version in person. and but and and and part of the reason why we also kind of had a bit of a swirl instead of kind of a more of a straight line was we were you know it's a forward chronological story so it's a big complicated story we don't want to confuse people the whole point of it is to be entertaining um and so we're trying to educate and inform but like our top priority is to make this stuff accessible and so i just thought it was it was my decision and i i felt like it was important to kind of like just have a forward chronological march so that you could kind of just you could absorb it easier if you're kind of jumping from this period to that period you know i think it just gets real confusing real fast so unlike a bunch of other tourists unlike the boston trail like we it's the the story kind of moves forward from bowling green to france's tavern you move from the beginning of the of the what historians call the imperial crisis the lead up to the war, um, to the revolution, to Washington's inauguration.

27:56Wow. Do you mind telling people what Francis Tavern is? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So Francis Tavern is like one of our like revolutionary gems. Um, so there's not much at all that survives from the, from the, from this period. And, um, that's part of the reason why New York, uh, is absent in the popular imagination around the revolution. Um, and Francis has undergone, uh, lots of revisions too, but that is the tavern where, um, you know, Washington, um, uh, when he came back into the city, um, he loses the city famously at the start of the war. The first major battle of the war is here in New York. He loses.

28:35Um, that's another reason why New York kind of gets displaced in the story. Uh, cause it's kind of seen as like this embarrassing defeat. He's badly outnumbered. He's going up against this massive army he's got this new poorly trained army you know like it of course he lost um and it actually like what we argue and again i'll back this up all day long um is that the conventional wisdom on that is wrong like it seems like a victory for the brits but actually like it turns out to be a pyrrhic victory and it's very very important it's a very very important way to understand the revolution that i think is a lot more in line with what the what historians would argue right um because they really lose the battle kind of for logistical reasons and because they lose hearts and minds because because for the brits the revolution is like vietnam you know it's this counterinsurgency they can't tell who's who's on their side who's not so they kind of immediately alienate the people who are on or are on their side by not letting not bringing them back into power in new york i mean i know you want to talk about francis i'm gonna go back no it's fine I'm fascinated with what you're saying right now.

29:42I'm thinking about these questions as you speak. So another reason why New York gets displaced from the story was this notion that it's a Tory town, i.e. that there's too many loyalists here. So unlike Boston and Philadelphia, which have far less loyalists, and I would argue for that reason are far less representative of the story, New York is a lot more divided. Manhattan itself, which is New York proper at the time, which is just really the lower, It's like everything below City Hall Park. It's very, very small. Also significant. We'll talk about that later. It's a solid, it's more or less a solidly rebel city.

30:20Everything outside though, today's New York City, the outer boroughs and the wider metropolitan region, more or less solidly loyalists, which is part of the reason why the Brits actually just kind of like waltz right in and trounce the Americans and Washington's army in that battle. But by the end of this period of seven years of military occupation under the British, which for everybody that's living outside of Manhattan is like this period of just like, I mean, these are the least known years of New York City's history. The history of New York City is probably, it rivals what's been written about World War II, which means that it's just about one of the biggest literatures out there in terms of like research.

31:03But this is the least known period of New York City's history by far, I would say. I agree. And it is part of the reason is that I think it's the darkest period of New York City history. So New Yorkers have to live under occupation. And the city, before this big battle, four in every five New Yorkers leave Manhattan. And the population then jumps tenfold within five years. and that's after the city has lost a fifth of its housing to this massive fire, which may or may not have been set by George Washington, after they lose the city. And the thing about Washington, just to address that before Twitter goes crazy, Washington asked the Continental Congress twice if he can burn down the city if he loses it because the thing was both sides of the conflict, the Brits and the rebels, around Washington, they both saw, in John Adams' word, New York was the key to the whole continent.

32:10And why was it such? Because New York, and this is a big factor actually in why New York becomes New York, it lies at the mouth of the Hudson. And in the age when rivers were highways, right, that was very important. The Hudson has 350 miles up to Canada, which means it gives you more access to North America than any other port south of Halifax. And this is still the end of the Little Ice Age. So Halifax is often frozen. So for the Brits, the idea is if we control New York, we'll control the Hudson and we can divide North and South, divide and conquer. This is the way the British built their empire.

32:43It's the way everybody kind of builds their empire. So we'll control this. We'll divide and conquer. That turns out not to be the case for them, but that's why the first major battle of the war and the largest battle of the war and the most important battle of the war because it almost comes to an end at several times, several points in this battle that takes place over several months at the end of 76 here in New York city, when, when all of the surrounding area becomes like a literal battlefield. Um, there are several points in which it could have all been over just a few, you know, months after, um, the declaration of independence is, is issued.

33:20Um, uh, so, and the reason, you know, it's the, it's the biggest, the Brits send 32 ,000 people on 421 vessels into New York's Harbor in the summer of 76. To give you a sense of the scale of that in terms of proportion then and now, the population of New York City was 25 ,000. So it, you know, in the famous, the most famous quote from this period is it looked like all of London was afloat. And that's why people flee because they're expecting that the British might just bomb this thing to bits, right? And that if they lose it, they might be the ones to burn it down. But there's only one book on this question of the, of the fire just came out.

34:00It was one of our advisors, Ben, Benjamin Carp, who teaches at CUNY graduate school is a great historian. Um, uh, you know, uh, Ben would say we, we don't have a smoking gun. We never will. Um, but the evidence suggests that it was lit by rebels. Now that could have been an order that came down from Washington. There's this kind of famous letter where he says to his cousin later on, like, you know, something on the lines of kind of like, well, we really got lucky with that fire huh you know um uh but it could have easily also just been some member low-level member of the rebel because because by that point you know um and this is another reason why new york is important i think you get a really vivid sense um of what causes the revolution so um uh you know stop me when i'm when i'm going on too much but New York is, we fixate on, you know, Massachusetts and Virginia have long kind of dominated colonial history and the public understanding of the colonial period.

35:03New York was not, it was not the biggest port of the ports. It was the second biggest by the time we get around to the revolution. And it only outstrips Boston as a second biggest, I think by like 1740, 1750. So that's already very late in the colonial period. However, already by 1730, King George II, Papa George to the George that we fight in the war, is calling New York like exceedingly necessary to our kingdom. It's closer to the West Indies, which is the most profitable part of the empire than Boston. So it gradually outstrips it. It's also at the mouth of the Hudson, which again, they see as continentally strategic, particularly when the French are in North America and the French are their big rivals.

35:51So, and what's most, what's sort of significant about, I think the New York lens, it gives you really a vivid sense of what the revolution is for the colonials at large. I said before that it's, you know, it's very divided, it's divided and that's, that makes it more representative. Historians estimate that only 40 % of the population supported the revolution. Another 40 % were neutral and 20 % were loyal, which is slightly different from what the founders thought. Like John Adams famously says, like it was a third, a third, a third. So it's been called increasingly since the 70s and it's more or less the dominant narrative now that the revolution is America's first civil war.

36:32And it really is a civil war. Like the loyalist fight in 500 plus of like 700 plus battles and skirmish, right? So it's literally neighbor on neighbor violence. And that's just the uniformed guys, right? There's also just like neighbor on neighbor, like informal violence, right? You get a vivid sense of that here in New York because the Brits lose, the Brits reconquer New York, but Washington is like near obsessed with like reclaiming it because in part, because he thinks it is really kind of really strategically important. And so he keeps a very large contingent outside of the city. And those two armies are constantly sort of taking that perimeter around Manhattan as like their sort of raiding ground.

37:14And they're forced to because in Manhattan, and you're literally cut off from the continent. And so if only for like one resource alone, there's lots of resources that they're in need of, but this population jumps tenfold. There's a third of the battles in the revolution happened in New York. Two thirds happened in New York and New Jersey. And New York's the only place that the British managed to hold on to consistently. It's their headquarters, but it's also really the only place that they managed to hold on to for a long time. Um, so most of the refugees come here, they often come penniless.