Donald L. Miller – Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America

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”?

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