Tyler Anbinder: City of Dreams

In celebration of the solo exhibition Heather Stivison: Borders and Boundaries, author Tyler Anbinder will join Stivison at Pleiades Gallery for a fascinating dialogue with the artist.

Historian Tyler Anbinder will discuss City of Dreams: The 400 Year Epic History of Immigrant New York, while surrounded by Stivison’s works. Anbinder is the author of the book of the same name which was described by the New York Times as “A richly textured guide to the history of our immigrant nation’s pinnacle immigrant city.”  The Boston Globe noted it was "Told brilliantly, even unforgettably ... An American story, one that belongs to all of us."

Tyler Anbinder is a historian specializing in American immigration history, the history of New York City, and the era of the American Civil War. He is the author of three award-winning books: Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (1992); Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (2001); and City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (2016). In March, he published Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York. Anbinder’s publications have been honored with the Avery Craven Prize of the Organization of American Historians, the Mark Lynton History Prize of the Columbia School of Journalism, and the Hubbell Prize of the Society of Civil War Historians. Anbinder has also held the Fulbright Commission’s Thomas Jefferson Distinguished Chair in American History at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and has won three prestigious research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was a professor of history for thirty years before retiring from his post at George Washington University in 2020.