Making Long Island with author Lawrence R. Samuel 

Date: Sunday, November 5th, 2023

Time: 3:00 P.M.

MAKING LONG ISLAND is a history of Long Island (Nassau and Suffolk counties) between 1920 and 1980, adding to our understanding of not just the history of the island but that of New York State and the United States. Told chronologically, the book sheds new light on the development of Long Island and its intimate relationship with New York City, contributing to the fields of both urban and suburban history. Between the 1920s and 1950s, I show, Long Island served as a primary site of the pursuit of the American dream, as it was affordable home ownership for the (white) middle class that most compellingly expressed the nation’s core mythology steeped in success, financial security, upward mobility, and consumerism. Beginning in the 1960s, however, the dream began to dissolve, as the postwar economic engine ran out of steam and Long Island became as much urban as suburban.

“How did a once sparsely populated region dominated by farming and fishing grow into the powerhouse of the postwar suburban American dream in just a few decades?  In Making Long Island, Samuel provides a fresh read of the events that brought success and challenges to what still happens to be ‘one of the most interesting and beautiful places on the planet.’” 

• Joshua Ruff, Co-Executive Director, Collections & Programming, Long Island Museum
  “Like a cool breeze on a hot summer day in the Hamptons, Making Long Island is a much welcomed, refreshing account of the vibrant and complicated history of Long Island. Not only does the book illuminate the island’s development and shifting population over time and space, but it also reminds us that by shining light on the underbelly of the American dream, we are better equipped to reconsider and re-imagine it.”
• Jennifer J. Thompson Burns, PhD., Lecturer, University at Albany, SUNY
  “The result of both substantial research and stylish writing, this is a book that every resident of Long Island should read. I’d heartily recommend it to out-of-towners too, as Samuel shows not only that Long Island is a microcosm of the American story, but one of its major drivers.”
• Harold Holzer, Jonathan F. Fanton Director, Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, CUNY

Lawrence R. Samuel is a Miami- and New York City-based cultural historian and a Long Island native. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota and was a Smithsonian Institution Fellow. His previous books include The End of the Innocence: The 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair (Syracuse University Press, 2007), New York City 1964: A Cultural History (McFarland, 2014), Tudor City: Manhattan’s Historic Residential Enclave (The History Press, 2019), and Dead on Arrival in Manhattan: Stories of Unnatural Demise from the Past Century (The History Press, 2021).

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