This profile is part of a series of interviews chronicling the experiences of researchers who use The New York Public Library's collections for the development of their work.

David Paul Kuhn is the author of The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution—one of the New York Times' “100 Notable Books of 2020.”

What brought you to the Library? 

For this book, The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution, only about a third of the book told the story of the riot itself. The other two-thirds concerned the drama that made New York City a microcosm, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, of the class tension between blue-collar whites and the emerging upscale left—as well as other narrative threads, such as Richard Nixon’s blue-collar strategy. To tell that larger story, I had to read everything I could. The New York Public Library made that possible.

What research tools could you not live without?

ProQuest! Sure, I would manage without it. But for research, I’d sooner give up Google or myriad databases than ProQuest. It’s an amazing tool for reading modern history as it happened. 

What’s the most unexpected item you encountered in your research?

The inaccuracy of the media’s contemporaneous reporting on the Hardhat Riot itself (though first drafts of history are exactly that, first drafts), but also how that skewed later writing, from magazines to journals. Equally, that some seminal history of the era had been exceedingly chronicled, but key events were overlooked or downplayed. 

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

“On the eve of the [American] Revolution, the crown instructed its governors to veto all colonial efforts to liberalize the divorce laws.”

(The indispensable The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood, page 147.)

Describe a moment when your research took an unexpected turn.

After much frustration using FOIA/FOIL with agencies from the NYPD to the FBI, I learned that most of the unread records I sought were stored outside the purview of the modern NYPD, due to litigation. It took time to gain access. But once I saw that first box and opened the first folder, I knew I had a book.

How do you maintain your research momentum?

Curiosity and humility. The virtue of curiosity is obvious. But humility also drives you. You must feel the responsibility to tell history accurately. And if writing a controversial history, one must expect incoming fire. That should make you more cautious. Make you want to read more, mine the data more, learn more. And coffee helps.

After a day of working/researching, what do you do to unwind?

Have a drink.

Is there anything you'd like to tell someone looking to get started?

Get started. And keep in mind: investigative research or reporting is like constantly hitting traffic jams and road closures. Seek new routes. But sometimes you also have to wait out the resistance. You need to embrace the slog and keep moving forward.