Acknowledgments

This book originated in discussions with our colleague Ralph Janis, a native of Brooklyn and the long-time director of the Cornell Adult University. Trained as an urban historian at the University of Michigan, Ralph has a special interest—and expertise—in architecture, the character of residential and commercial neighborhoods, and the impact of transportation on migration and urban population growth. The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn ventures into other areas of Brooklyn’s history, but it was Ralph who came up with the topic and gave us this title. We are grateful for this and his many other suggestions.

Several friends contributed as readers and discussants. Carol Berkin and Margery Mandell were ideal readers who helped us shape and sharpen our argument at many turns. Jerry Heinzen, David Glaser, Patrick Burns, Jed Horwitt, Robert Summers, and the late and much-missed Isaac Kramnick offered ideas while expressing (or feigning) interest in our own. Thomas Campanella, a historian of city planning and the urban built environment at Cornell (and another Brooklynite), gave us a preview of his superb book, Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, and shared information, insights, and bibliographic suggestions about his project and ours. Two anonymous readers of our draft manuscript for Cornell University Press suggested revisions that have significantly improved the book.

We are grateful to the staffs of the Center for Brooklyn History (formerly the Brooklyn Historical Society), the New-York Historical Society, the Cornell University Library, and in particular the Brooklyn Public Library, which digitized copies of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the newspaper of record for Brooklyn’s history during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and provided a free database of issues from 1841 to 1955. We are indebted as well to Arianna Gonzalez, a Cornell undergraduate, who translated articles published in Il Progresso from Italian into English; and to Beth Beach, one of the world’s greatest administrative assistants, who found primary and secondary sources about Brooklyn, picked them up at the Cornell University Library, ordered them on interlibrary loan, and sent us digitized texts. Michael McGandy, our editor, who knows quite a lot about Brooklyn, never stopped trying to make this book better.

We close with an acknowledgment—and celebration—of a collaboration that has now produced three books. More than collaborators, we are friends. We doubt that we have another book in us, but we intend to spend lots of time together, gossiping about Cornell University, talking about American politics, the Boston Red Sox, and the Buffalo Bills, eating good food, and most of all, sharing the benefits of a long-standing and genuine friendship.