Annemarie Sammartino

Professor of History Annemarie Sammartino published a piece on Co-op City, a cooperative in the Bronx, and its lessons for affordable housing policy makers and advocates in the Made by History section of the Washington Post. The Post article draws upon her recent book, Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York (Cornell UP, 2022).

Annemarie Sammartino's new book Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York (Cornell University Press, 2022) on the Bronx housing development and neighborhood Co-op City was featured on the "Bowery Boys Bookshelf." The Bowery Boys is a popular podcast about the history of New York City.

Professor of History Annemarie Sammartino published Freedomland, Co-op City and the Story of New York with Cornell University Press. The book uses the affordable housing development Co-op City, located in the Northeast Bronx, as a lens towards writing a new history of New York City that tells the story of race, ethnicity, class, urban crisis, and neoliberalism— but also of community, resistance, and utopia. 

Professor of History Annemarie Sammartino gave a lecture on "Consumer Culture in Cold War Europe" for the Advanced Placement European History's series of college faculty master classes designed to help students prepare for the AP exams this spring.

Professor and Chair of History Annemarie Sammartino was interviewed as part of the documentary “Beethoven's Scowl” on the CBC's Ideas program, which investigated the way that Beethoven has functioned as a symbol over the past two centuries. 

Associate Professor of History Annemarie Sammartino has published “Mass Housing, Late Modernism, and the Forging of Community in New York City and East Berlin, 1965-1989" in the American Historical Review (Volume 121, Issue 2, Pgs. 492-521).

Co-op City in New York City and Marzahn in East Berlin were constructed in the late 1960s and late 1970s, respectively. This article explores both the intentions of their planners and the experiences of their residents in these two very different societies. It challenges the standard narrative of urban modernism, which sees its demise with the growth of new urbanist critiques of the 1960s.

Instead, it posits that urban modernism proved flexible enough to respond to this challenge with developments like Co-op City and Marzahn, which were simultaneously more ambitious, more defensive, and more thoughtful about the nature and meaning of urban community than their modernist predecessors in the immediate postwar period. Finally, Sammartino argues that late modernist ideas about community, in particular a kind of urban community that offered a contrast to American-style consumerism, provide a connective thread across the Iron Curtain in the later Cold War.