The Road to Mobocracy

The Road to Mobocracy
Author: Paul A. Gilje
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 340
Release: 1987
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807841983

The Road to Mobocracy is the first major study of public disorder in New York City from the Revolutionary period through the Jacksonian era. During that time, the mob lost its traditional, institutional role as corporate safety valve and social cor

The Road to Mobocracy

The Road to Mobocracy
Author: Paul A. Gilje
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2014-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469608634

The Road to Mobocracy is the first major study of public disorder in New York City from the Revolutionary period through the Jacksonian era. During that time, the mob lost its traditional, institutional role as corporate safety valve and social corrective, tolerated by public officials. It became autonomous, a violent menace to individual and public good expressing the discordant urges and fears of a pluralistic society. Indeed, it tested the premises of democratic government. Paul Gilje relates the practices of New York mobs to their American and European roots and uses both historical and anthropological methods to show how those mobs adapted to local conditions. He questions many of the traditional assumptions about the nature of the mob and scrutinizes explanations of its transformation: among them, the loss of a single-interest society, industrialization and changes in the workforce, increased immigration, and the rise of sub-classes in American society. Gilje's findings can be extended to other cities. The lucid narrative incorporates meticulous and exhaustive archival research that unearths hundreds of New York City disturbances -- about the Revolution, bawdy-houses, theaters, dogs and hogs, politics, elections, ethnic conflict, labor actions, religion. Illustrations recreate the turbulent atmosphere of the city; maps, graphs, and tables define the spacial and statistical dimensions of its ferment. The book is a major contribution to our understanding of social change in the early Republic as well as to the history of early New York, urban studies, and rioting.

Sex, Love, Race

Sex, Love, Race
Author: Martha Hodes
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 547
Release: 1999
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0814735568

"Since the colonial era, North America has been defined and continually redefined by the intersections of sex, violence, and love across racial boundaries. Motivated by conquest, economics, desire, and romance, such crossings have profoundly affected American society by disturbing dominant ideas about race and sexuality. Sex, Love, Race provides a historical foundation for contemporary discussions of sex across racial lines, which, despite the numbers of interracial marriages and multi-racial children, remains a controversial issue today. The first historical anthology to focus solely and widely on the subject, Sex, Love, Race gathers new essays by both younger and well-known scholars which probe why and how sex across racial boundaries has so threatened Americans of all colors and classes. Traversing the whole of American history, from liaisons among Indians, Europeans, and Africans to twentieth-century social scientists' fascination with sex between Asian Americans and whits, the essays cover a range of regions, and of racial, ethnic, and sexual identities, in North America"--Back cover

Slavery and Freedom Among Early American Workers

Slavery and Freedom Among Early American Workers
Author: Graham Russell Hodges
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2016-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1315503409

Covering a chronological span from the seventeenth century to the Civil War, the book reunites black and labor history, including such major topics as the formation of slavery in the North, the American Revolution, blacks and the Workingmen's Movement, and interracial marriage before the Civil War. This book provides fascinating reading for students of American history, labor history, urban history, and black history.

We Shall Be No More

We Shall Be No More
Author: Richard Bell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2012-03-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674064798

Suicide is a quintessentially individual act, yet one with unexpectedly broad social implications. Though seen today as a private phenomenon, in the uncertain aftermath of the American Revolution this personal act seemed to many to be a public threat that held no less than the fate of the fledgling Republic in its grip. Salacious novelists and eager newspapermen broadcast images of a young nation rapidly destroying itself. Parents, physicians, ministers, and magistrates debated the meaning of self-destruction and whether it could (or should) be prevented. Jailers and justice officials rushed to thwart condemned prisoners who made halters from bedsheets, while abolitionists used slave suicides as testimony to both the ravages of the peculiar institution and the humanity of its victims. Struggling to create a viable political community out of extraordinary national turmoil, these interest groups invoked self-murder as a means to confront the most consequential questions facing the newly united states: What is the appropriate balance between individual liberty and social order? Who owns the self? And how far should the control of the state (or the church, or a husband, or a master) extend over the individual?With visceral prose and an abundance of evocative primary sources, Richard Bell lays bare the ways in which self-destruction in early America was perceived as a transgressive challenge to embodied authority, a portent of both danger and possibility. His unique study of suicide between the Revolution and Reconstruction uncovers what was at stake-personally and politically-in the nation's fraught first decades.

Mr. Lancaster's System

Mr. Lancaster's System
Author: Adam Laats
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2024-09-17
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1421449366

"This work explains how a failed school-reform system, championed by a delusional narcissist, ended up creating modern urban public education in the US in the early 1800s"--

Taming Manhattan

Taming Manhattan
Author: Catherine McNeur
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2014-11-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674745140

George Perkins Marsh Prize, American Society for Environmental History VSNY Book Award, New York Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America Hornblower Award for a First Book, New York Society Library James Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic With pigs roaming the streets and cows foraging in the Battery, antebellum Manhattan would have been unrecognizable to inhabitants of today’s sprawling metropolis. Fruits and vegetables came from small market gardens in the city, and manure piled high on streets and docks was gold to nearby farmers. But as Catherine McNeur reveals in this environmental history of Gotham, a battle to control the boundaries between city and country was already being waged, and the winners would take dramatic steps to outlaw New York’s wild side. “[A] fine book which make[s] a real contribution to urban biography.” —Joseph Rykwert, Times Literary Supplement “Tells an odd story in lively prose...The city McNeur depicts in Taming Manhattan is the pestiferous obverse of the belle epoque city of Henry James and Edith Wharton that sits comfortably in many imaginations...[Taming Manhattan] is a smart book that engages in the old fashioned business of trying to harvest lessons for the present from the past.” —Alexander Nazaryan, New York Times

Marching on Washington

Marching on Washington
Author: Lucy G. Barber
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2004-04-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520242157

"Beautifully written. Lucy G. Barber has taken different stories and woven them together so that each builds into a larger narrative about the history of political protest. By looking across a series of marches, Barber explores issues that escape more focused studies, such as the development of marching on Washington as a political strategy, and the changing conception of Washington as a public space. The scope of the research and the author's craft in telling these stories sheds new light on important moments in American history."—Mary L. Dudziak, author of Cold War Civil Rights

New York City Cartmen, 1667-1850

New York City Cartmen, 1667-1850
Author: Graham Russell Gao Hodges
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2012-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1479800457

The cartmen—unskilled workers who hauled goods on one horsecarts—were perhaps the most important labor group in early American cities. The forerunners of the Teamsters Union, these white-frocked laborers moved almost all of the nation’s possessions, touching the lives of virtually every American. New York City Cartmen, 1667–1850 tells the story of this vital group of laborers. Besides documenting the cartmen’s history, the book also demonstrates the tremendous impact of government intervention into the American economy via the creation of labor laws. The cartmen possessed a hard-nosed political awareness, and because they transported essential goods, they achieved a status in New York City far above their skills or financial worth. Civic support and discrimination helped the cartmen create a community all their own. The cartmen's culture and their relationship with New York's municipal government are the direct ancestors of the city's fabled taxicab drivers. But this book is about the city itself. It is a stirring street-level account of the growth of New York, growth made possible by the efforts of the cartmen and other unskilled laborers. Containing 23 black-and-white illustrations, New York City Cartmen is informative reading for social, urban, and labor historians.

Evangelical Gotham

Evangelical Gotham
Author: Kyle B. Roberts
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2016-11-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 022638828X

At first glance, evangelical and Gotham seem like an odd pair. What does a movement of pious converts and reformers have to do with a city notoriously full of temptation and sin? More than you might think, says Kyle B. Roberts, who argues that religion must be considered alongside immigration, commerce, and real estate scarcity as one of the forces that shaped the New York City we know today. In Evangelical Gotham, Roberts explores the role of the urban evangelical community in the development of New York between the American Revolution and the Civil War. As developers prepared to open new neighborhoods uptown, evangelicals stood ready to build meetinghouses. As the city’s financial center emerged and solidified, evangelicals capitalized on the resultant wealth, technology, and resources to expand their missionary and benevolent causes. When they began to feel that the city’s morals had degenerated, evangelicals turned to temperance, Sunday school, prayer meetings, antislavery causes, and urban missions to reform their neighbors. The result of these efforts was Evangelical Gotham—a complicated and contradictory world whose influence spread far beyond the shores of Manhattan. Winner of the 2015 Dixon Ryan Fox Manuscript Prize from the New York State Historical Association