The History Author Show
August 17, 2015 – You’re familiar with our theme song, 1925’s New York Ain’t New York Anymore. It’s the perfect segue into today’s book, Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America. The story of speakeasies, Flappers and radio is brought to us by Donald L. Miller. He’s the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History at Lafayette College and also authored City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America. You can learn about these and his other projects at DonaldMillerBooks.com, and even take a spin around Jazz Age Manhattan on an interactive map.
If you have an eye for history — and you do, or why else would you be here — you’ll run into a lot of old friends reading Supreme City. Names that still generate excitement and nods of recognition a hundred years later. Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Tex Rickard, E.B. White, Elizabeth Arden. Ziegfeld, Chrysler, LaGuardia, Lindbergh, Sarnoff. But how did New York City get from there to here? How did it become, as Duke Ellington called it, “the capital of everything”?
Skinnie Magazine Interview for Savannah Book Festival 2015
”Supreme City’ pulls the reader back to the 1920s in New York City – the age of jazz, the age of ambition, the age of personalities and the blatant disregard of inhibitions. Mayor Jimmy Walker, “the very expression of Jazz Age New York,” is the perfect book opener for this energetic story of the transformation of Midtown Manhattan. Miller illustrates why there is no other place in the world like New York City.”
WNET, Metrofocus Interview
New York Times Podcast
New York Times Podcast Interview begins at 25 mins 15 secs
“This week, Ben Macintyre discusses “A Spy Among Friends”; Alexandra Alter and Parul Sehgal talk about the week’s literary news; Donald L. Miller discusses “Supreme City”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.”
(July 27, 2014)
In Conversation with Judith Reagan
In Conversation with Judith Reagan
(June 28, 2014)
WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show
Manhattan was transformed by jazz, night clubs, radio, skyscrapers, movies, and the tremendous energy of the 1920s. Donald Miller details the story of Manhattan’s growth and transformation in the roaring twenties and the brilliant people behind it. His book Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America looks at everyone from Walter Chrysler to William Paley, Elizabeth Arden and her rival Helena Rubenstein, who all shared ambition and a drive to fulfill their dreams in New York. He explains how Manhattan became the social, cultural, and commercial hub of the country
Listen to the full interview here!
The Daily Beast: When New York City Hit it’s Stride
“Donald L. Miller’s Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America is an awesome book on an awesome subject, a time in the history of New York City when commerce and culture engaged in a symbiotic relationship, spurring an unprecedented boom in architecture, art, music, theater, popular culture, and mass communications that lit up the city, then America, and then the world…”
Read the rest of the interview here!
Lafayette College Interview: Supreme City, Supreme History
“Donald L. Miller believes that cities can be read like books. The historian thinks that histories of cities should read like novels. His latest history of a city reads like an epic novel…”
Read the entire interview here!