Mike Wallace, "a self-proclaimed radical historian whose magisterial, unvarnished biography of New York, Gotham, written with Edwin G. Burrows, won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired two more door-stopper volumes about the city," died July 5, the New York Times reported. He was 83.
Wallace, a pre-med student at Columbia in the 1960s, became radicalized in the years leading up to the 1968 student takeover of campus buildings to protest the Vietnam War. He "turned his studies to history, and came to define 'radical' as bottom-up social history that recognizes the profound influence of capitalism and of economic and social class distinctions and conflicts," the Times noted.
Wallace and Burrows began their project in 1976 after receiving a $7,000 grant to write a book that would encompass the global transition from feudalism to capitalism. They eventually chose to write the story focusing on New York City over the course of 500 years.
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1998) was published to coincide with the centennial of Greater New York. In the book, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for History, the co-authors "made a case that the consolidation of what became the five boroughs was a natural sequel by local government to what corporations had in the late 19th century recently accomplished to stifle competition through trusts and monopolies," the Times wrote.
"For all the big bankers and corporate executives' putative love of free markets," Wallace told the Times in 2017, "real capitalists of that era thought competition is lunatic. They have to cut wages, which leads to unionism, which has to be repressed, which leads to socialism."
The Pulitzer committee said, "The authors weave together diverse histories--of sex and sewer systems, finance and architecture, immigration and politics, poetry and crime--into a single narrative tapestry that reads like a fast-paced novel."
Wallace published two more volumes: Greater Gotham: A History of New York City From 1898 to 1919 (2017) and Gotham at War: A History of New York City From 1933 to 1945 (2025). He also wrote the collections Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (1996) and A New Deal for New York (2002). He and his wife, poet and playwright Carmen Boullosa, co-authored A Narco History: How the United States and Mexico Jointly Created the "Mexican Drug War" (2015).
In addition to his teaching career, Wallace directed the Radical History Forum for about 10 years in the 1970s and 1980s; helped save the New-York Historical Society (now the New York Historical) from financial collapse in the 1990s; advised Ric Burns on his PBS series New York: A Documentary Film; and in 2000 founded the Gotham Center for New York City History at the City University Graduate Center.
Wallace observed that "historiography--the study of history--is, like history itself, a constant struggle, in part because most people are focused less on what came before than on what's next," the Times noted that
"It's an American characteristic, to some degree," he told Columbia College Today in 2020l. "The past is the dustbin of history. It might be a source of amusing movies or interesting museum exhibits. But the action is in the future. Followed closely by the present."