Historic Towns

[C]olonial New York was always a turbulent little town, thanks especially to the large number of seafaring folk among its inhabitants. The sailors had an especial antipathy to the soldiers of the garrison, and rows between them were frequent; with more reason, they hated the press-gangs of the British frigates, and often interfered to save their victims, with the result producing actual riots, wherein bludgeons and cutlasses were freely used. -from "The Unrest Before the Revolution. 1764-1774"

A man of prodigious and wide-ranging interests, Theodore Roosevelt-politician and soldier, naturalist and historian-was the youngest president in American history, ascending to the office when he was only 42, but he had already distinguished himself before then.

In 1891, for instance, he published this wildly enjoyable and impressively informative history of New York City, from its first settlement by Europeans in the early 17th century-by the West India Company, charged with "peopling the world's waste spaces"-up to Roosevelt's present moment, at which he notes that "the average New Yorker yet possesses courage, energy, business capacity, much generosity of a practical sort, and shrewd, humorous common-sense."

This is a charming valentine to a great American city by one of America's great personalities.

Also available from Cosimo Classics: Roosevelt's Letters to His Children, A Book-Lover's Holidays in the Open, America and the World War, Through the Brazilian Wilderness and Papers on Natural History, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, and The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses.

OF INTEREST TO: Roosevelt fans, readers of New York City history, armchair time-travelers


American icon THEODORE ROOSEVELT (1858-1919) was 26th President of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909, and the first American to win a Nobel Prize, in 1906, when he was awarded the Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War. He is the author of 35 books.