The Gotham Center is delighted to be partnering with the Gardiner Foundation on this new writing fellowship, supporting promising book manuscripts near completion. The awards, four one-year grants of $40,000 delivered in 2020 and 2021, will favor projects that explore the under-researched boroughs of New York, recognizing a natural but excessive fixation on Manhattan’s role in the history of the city. Favor will also be given to projects that investigate the historical relationship between the metropolitan urban core and Long Island, as well as the latter's history in the development of the region, building on calls from leading scholars in urban and suburban history for a new “metropolitan approach” which better integrates the fields, recognizing the deep, co-dependent relations between 'city' and 'suburb.' Favor will go as well to independent and early-career professionals, recognizing their greater challenges in the world of professional history today. The program will provide a higher level of review than is currently available in many fellowships, with two readers assisting fellows in development of argument, and one, Pulitzer-winner and Gotham Center founder Mike Wallace, focusing on style and presentation. Fellows will be given a year of office space at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), and free access to its consortium library  holdings and subscriptions. They will be expected to develop public programs or workshops at the end of their fellowship year, presented at institutions with overlapping interests in the greater metropolitan area. In conjunction with the award, The Gotham Center will also be expanding its current directory of major historic archives and sites in New York City to include an up-to-date directory of Long Island’s historic sites and archives, open-access directories that will be housed on the organization's highly trafficked website.