““A string of city histories appeared, some in the elegiac vein pioneered by Abram Dayton’s Last Days of Knickerbocker New York (1882), others works of substantial scholarship, much though not all of it written by women. Martha Lamb’s History of the City of New York was published beginning in 1877; in 1884, Benson J. Lossing published his two-volume History of New York City; and Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer penned historical essays for Century Magazine, which prefigured her later two-volume study of the seventeenth-century city.””