Tyler Anbinder – Jill Grinberg Literary Management

Tyler Anbinder

Tyler Anbinder is a retired professor of history and former chair of the History Department at George Washington University, and author of three award-winning books of historical nonfiction: Nativism and Slavery, winner of the Avery Craven Prize of the Organization of American Historians; Five Points, winner of the New York City Book Prize of 2001; and City of Dreams, winner of the Mark Lynton Prize for History. His next book, Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York, will be published by Little, Brown and Company and is currently slated for release in March 2024. He also served as a consultant to Martin Scorsese for the Academy Award-nominated film Gangs of New York.

Agent

Jill Grinberg

Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York

From the award-winning author of Five Points and City of Dreams, a breathtaking new history of the first generation of Irish immigrants to arrive in the United States after the Great Potato Famine, showing how their strivings in and beyond New York exemplify the astonishing tenacity and improbable triumph of Irish America.

In 1845, a fungus began to eradicate Ireland’s potato crop, triggering a famine that would result in the deaths of one million Irish men, women, and children—and paving the way for one million more to flee for America. Ten years later, the United States had been transformed by this stupendous Atlantic port; by 1855, roughly one quarter of all adults living in Manhattan were immigrants who had escaped the hunger in Ireland. These so-called “Famine Irish” were the forebears of four U.S. presidents (including Joe Biden) yet at the time they were consigned to the lowest-paying jobs and subjected to the acrimony and ridicule of their new countrymen; even today, the popular perception of them is one of destitution, helplessness, and despair. But the Famine Irish themselves told a different story.

In this magisterial work of storytelling and scholarship, acclaimed historian Tyler Anbinder presents for the first time this generation’s individual and collective tales of struggle, perseverance, and triumph. Drawing on untapped documents and an astonishing ten-year, NEH-backed research initiative, Anbinder reclaims the narratives of the cohort of refugees who entered New York City in the 1850s on their way to reshaping the nation. Plentiful Country is a tour de force—a book that rescues the Famine immigrants from the margins of history and restores them to their rightful place at the center of the American story.

Publisher

Little, Brown and Company

Publication Date

March 12, 2024

Age Category

Adult

Genre

Nonfiction/History

Rights

JGLM

City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize

New York has been America’s city of immigrants for nearly four centuries. Growing from Peter Minuit’s tiny settlement of 1626 to a clamorous metropolis with more than three million immigrants today, the city has always been a magnet for transplants from all over the globe. City of Dreams is the long-overdue, inspiring, and defining account of New York’s immigrants, both famous and forgotten: the young man from the Caribbean who relocated to New York and became a founding father; Russian-born Emma Goldman, who condoned the murder of American industrialists as a means of aiding downtrodden workers; Dominican immigrant Oscar de la Renta, who dressed first ladies from Jackie Kennedy to Michelle Obama. Over ten years in the making, Tyler Anbinder’s story is one of innovators and artists, revolutionaries and rioters, staggering deprivation and soaring triumphs. In so many ways, today’s immigrants are just like those who came to America in centuries past—and their stories have never before been told with such breadth of scope, lavish research, and resounding spirit.

Praise for City of Dreams

“Told brilliantly, even unforgettably … An American story, one that belongs to all of us.” —Boston Globe

“A richly textured guide to the history of our immigrant nation’s pinnacle immigrant city has managed to enter the stage during an election season that has resurrected this historically fraught topic in all its fierceness.” —New York Times Book Review

Publisher

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Publication Date

October 18, 2016

Age Category

Adult

Genre

Nonfiction/History

Rights

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum

Details the notorious neighborhood that was once filled with gaming dens, bordellos, dirty streets, and tenements, that welcomed such visitors as Charles Dickens and Abraham Lincoln, and brings to light the hidden world that existed beneath its squalor.

Praise for Five Points

“Five Points has been brought back to life by Tyler Anbinder.”—The New York Observer

“The author has performed a prodigious…feat of research, leaving no original or secondary source untouched…a solid work of scholarship that deserves a permanent place in any top shelf of urban history.” —The Washington Times

Publisher

Free Press/S&S

Publication Date

September 4, 2001

Age Category

Adult

Genre

Nonfiction/History

Rights

Simon & Schuster