Daniel Wortel-London for Jacobin: “Zohran Mamdani Can Reduce New York’s Dependence on the Rich”
Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City on a progressive platform promising affordability to its working class residents. This message has historically been a winning one, writes Visiting Assistant Professor of History Daniel Wortel-London for Jacobin: “But history also reveals a more sobering lesson: you can’t finance progressive policies with a regressive economy.”
Daniel Wortel-London for Jacobin: “Zohran Mamdani Can Reduce New York’s Dependence on the Rich”
Drawing lessons from New York’s past, Wortel-London makes the historical case that mayor-elect Mamdani will need to reduce the City’s reliance on tax income from its wealthiest residents. “According to the city’s Independent Budget Office, the top 1 percent of earners now contribute about 45 percent of all local personal income tax revenues, up from roughly 30 percent in the 1980s,” he writes. In order to achieve the policies laid out during his campaign, Mamdani will need to diversify the City’s tax base. So far, “there are good signs that the incoming mayor is ready to do this,” Wortel-London writes. “Mamdani is poised to help New York City shift its economic foundations while continuing to tax the wealthy as much as necessary—moving toward an economy that is healthier, more balanced, and better aligned with the needs of the public and the public sector.”
The Historical Studies Program at Bard College encourages students to examine history through the prism of other relevant disciplines such as anthropology, economics, and philosophy and different forms of expression. The program also introduces students to a variety of methodological perspectives used in historical research and to philosophical assumptions about men, women, and society that underlie these perspectives.
Post Date: 12-09-2025
Professor Daniel Wortel-London Quoted in Al Jazeera Article About Mamdani’s Win in NYC
Daniel Wortel-London, visiting assistant professor of history at Bard College, was quoted in an article by Al Jazeera that explored what Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral election means for the rest of the Democratic party. Wortel-London said that Mamdani’s success signified that “affordability is the defining issue of our time,” adding that “if Democrats want to bridge their internal divisions and rebuild a broad coalition, they’ll need to take a page from Mamdani’s playbook.”Professor Daniel Wortel-London Quoted in Al Jazeera Article About Mamdani’s Win in NYC
The Historical Studies Program at Bard College encourages students to examine history through the prism of other relevant disciplines such as anthropology, economics, and philosophy and different forms of expression. The program also introduces students to a variety of methodological perspectives used in historical research and to philosophical assumptions about men, women, and society that underlie these perspectives.
Post Date: 11-11-2025
Professor Daniel Wortel-London Interviewed in Phenomenal World
Visiting Assistant Professor Daniel Wortel-London was interviewed about cities and private enterprise in the magazine Phenomenal World. As “the basic assumptions about what cities do and who they serve are undergoing a historic revision,” Wortel-London argues urban growth can be decoupled from private interests. also discussed his book The Menace of Prosperity which tells the history of New York’s development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Professor Daniel Wortel-London Interviewed in Phenomenal World
Wortel-London also discussed his new book The Menace of Prosperity, which tells the history of New York’s development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Speaking about public options for city utilities and housing and the pushback to them, Wortel-London says this time period shows “fiscal crises and underdevelopment derive not only from the absence of growth, but also from its presence.”
Post Date: 10-07-2025
More History News
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Op-Ed: Daniel Wortel-London on Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign in NY Daily News
Op-Ed: Daniel Wortel-London on Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign in NY Daily News
Visiting Assistant Professor of History Daniel Wortel-London published an op-ed in the New York Daily News about Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s tax plan. Contrary to popular belief, he argues, taxing the rich means designing the economy around the wealthy, and “To rely on them to finance an affordable city risks merely perpetuating the problem, a lesson previous mayors learned too late.” Rather, Wortel-London argues, the city must be remade “in the interest of the workers” by promoting models like worker-owned cooperatives, social housing initiatives, and community-led nonprofits.
Wortel-London’s new book, The Menace of Prosperity, is out from University of Chicago Press in September. It covers how the “fiscal imagination” of policymakers has shaped how cities run since the 19th century, often with unintended consequences for the livability of cities. The publisher describes Wortel-London’s “ambitious” book, stating “Overturning stale axioms about economic policy, The Menace of Prosperity shows that not all growth is productive for cities.”
Post Date: 07-01-2025
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Richard Aldous Reviews Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography for the Wall Street Journal
Richard Aldous Reviews Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography for the Wall Street Journal
Professor of History Richard Aldous published a review in the Wall Street Journal of Tom Arnold-Forster’s biography of Walter Lippmann, a twentieth-century journalist. Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography follows Lippmann’s career as one of the most ubiquitous journalists of his era who wrote several books of democratic theory. Aldous evaluates Arnold-Forster’s biography as a good first book and a “fair hearing,” rather than a defense, for its subject. Despite being less well-known today than some of his contemporaries, Lippmann was significant because of his “arresting, often contradictory ideas [that shaped] the national debate,” argues Aldous. He says Lippman passed the litmus test “for all public intellectuals— to illuminate their own time and make us think about ours.”
Post Date: 06-20-2025
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Bard College Presents Renowned Historian Dominic Sandbrook in Conversation with Richard Aldous on May 6
Bard College Presents Renowned Historian Dominic Sandbrook in Conversation with Richard Aldous on May 6
Bard College presents its annual Eugene Meyer Lecture in British History and Literature with renowned British historian Dominic Sandbrook. Sandbrook, one of Britain’s most distinguished historians and cohost of the most widely downloaded history podcast in the world The Rest is History, will talk about Britain in the 1980s with Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Distinguished Professor of History. The talk will take place in the Lásló Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium (RKC 103) of the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation at Bard College on Tuesday, May 6 at 5:30 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.
A hundred years after the birth of Magaret Thatcher and 50 years after she became the first woman to lead a major British political party, Dominic Sandbrook will delve into Britain in the seminal decade of the eighties. “The story of these years is bitterly contested,” he has written. “There is no consensus about the 1980s and there never will be.” From the conservative revolution to inner-city riots, Princess Diana, Chariots of Fire, and multiculturalism, this was a time of great cultural originality, political ambition and controversy, and wide scale social change—and all to a soundtrack by The Specials, Bananarama, and The Clash. Bard professor Richard Aldous will speak with renowned historian Dominic Sandbrook about Britain in the eighties for the latest event in Bard’s Eugene Meyer Lecture Series on British History and Literature, commemorating Eugene Meyer (1875–1959)—owner and publisher of the Washington Post, Chairman of the Federal Reserve and first President of the World Bank.
“Dominic Sandbrook is that rare thing, the brilliant historian who is also immensely popular,” says Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Distinguished Professor of History at Bard. “His revisionist scholarship has transformed the way in which we write about postwar Britain, and his podcast, The Rest is History—with 11 million monthly downloads—has used technology to expand the range of how history is presented and enjoyed.”
Dominic Sandbrook is one Britain’s best and best-known historians. Educated at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, he taught at the University of Sheffield before becoming a full-time writer. He is the author of eight books, including five volumes of a bestselling and critically acclaimed history of Britain from the 1960s to the 1980s. He has presented numerous BBC documentaries and is cohost of The Rest is History—the most popular history podcast in the world. He is currently working on an opera about Margaret Thatcher with the composer Joseph Phibbs.
Richard Aldous is Eugene Meyer Distinguished Professor of History at Bard and the author of eight books, including Reagan and Thatcher.
The Eugene Meyer Series was established in 2010 in association with the endowment of the tenured Eugene Meyer Chair. Richard Aldous has held the chair since its inception. Previous Eugene Meyer Lecture Series invited speakers have included Sir David Cannadine, Andrew Roberts, Colm Tóibín, Olivette Otele, David Reynolds, Fintan O’Toole, Francine Prose, and Lord Skidelsky.
Post Date: 04-08-2025
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Bard Professor Christian Ayne Crouch Participates in “Unsettled Landscapes” Roundtable Discussion
Bard Professor Christian Ayne Crouch Participates in “Unsettled Landscapes” Roundtable Discussion
Christian Ayne Crouch, dean of graduate studies and associate professor of history and American and Indigenous studies at Bard College, participated in a roundtable conversation with Alan Michelson, an artist and Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, and Dr. Scott Manning Stevens, who is a citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation and curator of the exhibit Native Prospects: Indigeneity and Landscape, featuring works by Michelson and other contemporary Indigenous artists. The event, “Unsettled Landscapes,” was sponsored by the Bard College Center for Indigenous Studies and took place at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, where Native Prospects is on display. In presentations, Stevens and Michelson examine the concepts of landscape, wilderness and the Sublime in western artistic tradition, and offer perspective on how fundamentally these notions differ in Native American modes of thought. “What I wanted to do, then, in the exhibition that’s up, is bring in both older representations of Native people thinking of landscape and abstract, lived experience ways, and then contemporary expressions of landscape,” said Stevens. “Because, it’s not that we don’t love the landscape—we love the beauty of it. But it’s not a commodity which we frame and own, but much more reflect on the experience of living in.”
Post Date: 10-15-2024
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Book Review: Richard Aldous Reviews America’s Cold Warrior by James Graham Wilson
Book Review: Richard Aldous Reviews America’s Cold Warrior by James Graham Wilson
In a review for the Wall Street Journal, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College Richard Aldous calls James Graham Wilson’s America’s Cold War Warrior on the life and legacy of statesman Paul Nitze “a brilliant political biography, elegantly written, rich in archival material.” Nitze was an expert on military power and strategic arms and served as negotiator and diplomat in several administrations from the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. Although lesser known than many of his Cold War contemporaries, Nitze notably “took a ‘walk in the woods’ with his Soviet counterpart at arms-control talks in Geneva in 1982, during the Reagan administration,” which “lay the groundwork” for the historic Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first arms-control agreement to abolish an entire category of weapons systems signed by Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev five years later. “Wilson sets out to remind us of Nitze’s critical role in a period of dangerous international rivalry,” writes Aldous.
Post Date: 07-23-2024
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Bard Professor Richard Aldous’s New Book The Dillon Era Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal
Bard Professor Richard Aldous’s New Book The Dillon Era Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal
The Dillon Era, a new book by Richard Aldous, Eugene Meyer Professor of British History and Culture at Bard College, was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. The book, which explores the political career of C. Douglas Dillon, the 57th US secretary of the treasury, offers a new perspective of Dillon as an overlooked but deeply influential figure in the presidential administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Aldous “makes a persuasive case for Dillon’s beneficial role in the tumultuous history of postwar America,” writes Philip Terzian for the Wall Street Journal. “Along the way, he invokes testimonials from JFK (who, according to his brother Robert, thought Dillon ‘a brilliant man’) and approbation from the economist Paul Samuelson and the campaign chronicler Theodore H. White, as well as from the New York Times editorial page, which coined the phrase that furnishes the book’s title.”
Post Date: 10-10-2023
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