On New York's Immigration: I think the most phenomenal aspect of New York City, and it's almost continuous in New York City's history, is the sort of revolutionary movement of the population. These wild demographic shifts that occur every 20 years, the huge influx of people from all around the world. No other city can claim that type of population swing. Right now Brooklyn claims the largest African-descended population in the world outside Lagos, Nigeria. On Why People Came: I think the fiction of New York history and New Yorkers' self-perceptions, is that they were the most tolerant people in the world, the cosmopolitan New Yorker able to accept anyone who came. The reality of New York history reveals quite a bit more tension and conflict in the actual day-to-day social relations of New Yorkers. And so I don't think that it's the tolerance that allowed people to come to New York City. I think it was probably more economic and political factors that created New York as this sort of warehouse for the world's population, one of them being New York's commercial rise -- the linking of a sort of human traffic to commercial traffic, so that many of the people who came across the Atlantic in the 19th Century were coming to New York City simply because the commercial routes ran to New York City. On Walt Whitman: Whitman is probably one of the most fascinating figures of the antebellum period in that his mind is truly tortured by what is happening around him. And I think because he is a journalist, because he is a newspaper editor, because he is a poet, because he looks at human affairs and has to write about human affairs, he's a person who is tortured in trying to find ways to express what is happening. Whitman starts out writing for these one penny rags, the NEW YORK AURORA and other such papers. He eventually finds himself as the editor of the pro-slavery, pro-democrat BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE, from which he is fired for expressing a moderate anti-slavery thought, which is not really an anti-slavery thought, it was just about slavery's extension into the west. He was a pro-slavery person, pro-slavery editor, and pro-slavery idealogue for most of his career. But Whitman I think, really comes to represent a whole generation of people who didn't know who to blame for what was happening in their society. They didn't know who to blame slavery on, so they blamed it on abolitionists, the people who were fighting against it. They didn't know who to blame poverty on, so they blamed it on Irish-Catholics, the people who suffered it most. They didn't know who to blame the condition of free-Negroes on, so they blamed it on free black people -- the people who actually suffered those conditions, and they really didn't get better at explaining their world until long after the Civil War because the Civil War settled many of the conflicts that they couldn't settle on their own.		An assistant professor of history at Williams College, Wilder grew up in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. His dissertation, entitled "Race and the History of Brooklyn, New York," traces the history of the borough from the time of the Dutch to today, and discusses its development through the prism of African-American society. He has worked as a historian, as well as curator of a New York State Museum show about Harlem in the 1920's. Wilder is currently writing a history of African-American communities and religious institutions in New York.