The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn

The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn
Author: Stuart M. Blumin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2022-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501765531

Winner of the Herbert H. Lehman Prize by the New York Academy of History. In The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn, Stuart M. Blumin and Glenn C. Altschuler detail how nineteenth-century Brooklyn was dominated by Puritan New England Protestants and how their control unraveled with the arrival of diverse groups in the twentieth century. Before becoming a hub of urban diversity, Brooklyn was a charming "town across the river" from Manhattan, known for its churches and suburban life. This changed with the city's growth, new secular institutions, and Coney Island's attractions, which clashed with post-Puritan values. Despite these changes, Yankee-Protestant dominance continued until the influx of Southern and Eastern European immigrants. The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn explores how these new residents built a vibrant ethnic mosaic, laying the foundation for cultural pluralism and embedding it in the American Creed.

Brooklyn Takes the Stage

Brooklyn Takes the Stage
Author: Samuel L. Leiter
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2023-12-29
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476693595

America's third largest city until 1890, Brooklyn, New York, had a striking theatrical culture before it became a borough of Greater New York in 1898. As the city gained size and influence, more and more theatres arose, with at least 15 venues ultimately vying for favor. Too many theatregoers, however, preferred the discomforts of a ferry and horsecar trip to New York's playhouses instead of supporting the local product. Nor did the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 do Brooklyn's theatres any favors. Manhattan's Goliath slayed Brooklyn's David. This first comprehensive study of Brooklyn's old-time theatre describes the city's early history, each of its many playhouses, its plays and actors (including nearly every foreign and domestic star), and its scandals and catastrophes, including the theatre fire that killed nearly 300. Brooklyn's ongoing struggle to establish theatres in a society dominated by anti-theatrical preachers, including Henry Ward Beecher, is detailed, as are all the ways that Brooklyn typified 19th century American theatre, from stock companies to combinations. Replete with fascinating anecdotes, this is the story of a major city from which theatre all but vanished before being reborn as a present-day artistic mecca.

Brooklyn Heights

Brooklyn Heights
Author: Robert Furman
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2015
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 162619954X

Settled in the 1600s, Brooklyn Heights is one of New York's most historic neighborhoods. Its strategic location overlooking the harbor proved instrumental during the Revolutionary War's Battle of Brooklyn. In the 1830s, steam ferries transformed it into America's first suburb, where abolitionism flourished and one of the largest Civil War Sanitary Fairs was held. Throughout the nineteenth century, wealthy philanthropists and entrepreneurs built high-styled Gothic Revival and Italianate homes and founded many landmark Brooklyn institutions. Though the neighborhood declined with the new century, it became a target of Robert Moses's urban renewal projects in the 1930s. Its designation as the city's first historic district saved Brooklyn Heights, and it has since blossomed into one of the city's most desirable neighborhoods.

Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow

Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow
Author: Brendan J. J. Payne
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2022-04-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807177709

In Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow, Brendan J. J. Payne reveals how prohibition helped realign the racial and religious order in the South by linking restrictions on alcohol with political preaching and the disfranchisement of Black voters. While both sides invoked Christianity, prohibitionists redefined churches’ doctrines, practices, and political engagement. White prohibitionists initially courted Black voters in the 1880s but soon dismissed them as hopelessly wet and sought to disfranchise them, stoking fears of drunken Black men defiling white women in their efforts to reframe alcohol restriction as a means of racial control. Later, as the alcohol industry grew desperate, it turned to Black voters, many of whom joined the brewers to preserve their voting rights and maintain personal liberties. Tracking southern debates about alcohol from the 1880s through the 1930s, Payne shows that prohibition only retreated from the region once the racial and religious order it helped enshrine had been secured.

The Party of Fear

The Party of Fear
Author: David Harry Bennett
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 522
Release: 1988
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807817728

David Bennett presents a ground-breaking historical analysis of the forces shaping nativist and counter-subversive activity in America from colonial times to the present. He demonstrates that in this nation of immigrants the American Right did not emerge form postfeudal parties of privilege or from the social chaos that bred a Hitler of Mussolini in Europe.

The People’s Zion

The People’s Zion
Author: Joel Cabrita
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2018-06-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674985761

In The People’s Zion, Joel Cabrita tells the transatlantic story of Southern Africa’s largest popular religious movement, Zionism. It began in Zion City, a utopian community established in 1900 just north of Chicago. The Zionist church, which promoted faith healing, drew tens of thousands of marginalized Americans from across racial and class divides. It also sent missionaries abroad, particularly to Southern Africa, where its uplifting spiritualism and pan-racialism resonated with urban working-class whites and blacks. Circulated throughout Southern Africa by Zion City’s missionaries and literature, Zionism thrived among white and black workers drawn to Johannesburg by the discovery of gold. As in Chicago, these early devotees of faith healing hoped for a color-blind society in which they could acquire equal status and purpose amid demoralizing social and economic circumstances. Defying segregation and later apartheid, black and white Zionists formed a uniquely cosmopolitan community that played a key role in remaking the racial politics of modern Southern Africa. Connecting cities, regions, and societies usually considered in isolation, Cabrita shows how Zionists on either side of the Atlantic used the democratic resources of evangelical Christianity to stake out a place of belonging within rapidly-changing societies. In doing so, they laid claim to nothing less than the Kingdom of God. Today, the number of American Zionists is small, but thousands of independent Zionist churches counting millions of members still dot the Southern African landscape.