Mike Wallace, a self-proclaimed radical historian whose magisterial, unvarnished biography of New York, ‘Gotham,’ won the Pulitzer Prize, died on Sunday in Mexico City. He was 83.

Early Life and Career

Wallace was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Fresh Meadows, Queens, and on Long Island. He became radicalized in the years leading up to the 1968 student takeover of campus buildings to protest the Vietnam War.

Wallace 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. He argued that in most conventional accounts ‘the dominant classes in the United States — wittingly or unwittingly — appropriated the past,’ and he incorporated the voices of women, Black people, the working class and others who had often been excluded.

Notable Works

What became a half-century scholarly undertaking began in 1976, when Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows were awarded a $7,000 grant to write an expansive book that would encompass the global transition from feudalism to capitalism. Eventually, they decided that telling the story through the prism of New York over 500 years was formidable enough.

Wallace’s book, ‘Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898,’ 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.

Original reporting: Texarkana Gazette — read the source article.