The Urban Threshold: Growth and Change in a Nineteenth-Century American Community (Heritage of Sociology)

Describes the political, social, cultural, and economic changes that affected the lives of individual citizens of Kingston, New York and the community as a whole in the nineteenth century

The Urban Threshold: Growth and Change in a Nineteenth-Century American Community

Politics & Social Sciences

Blumin, Stuart M.

Social Sciences

Univ of Chicago Pr

Describes the political, social, cultural, and economic changes that affected the lives of individual citizens of Kingston, New York and the community as a whole in the nineteenth century

Sociology

University of Chicago Press

First published in 1850, New York by Gas-Light explores the seamy side of the newly emerging metropolis: "the festivities of prostitution, the orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder, the scenes of drunkenness and beastly debauch, and all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum―the underground story―of life in New York!" The author of this lively and fascinating little book, which both attracted and offended large numbers of readers in Victorian America, was George G. Foster, reporter for Horace Greeley's influential New York Tribune, social commentator, poet, and man about town. Foster drew on his daily and nightly rambles through the city's streets and among the characters of the urban demi-monde to produce a sensationalized but extraordinarily revealing portrait of New York at the moment it was emerging as a major metropolis. Reprinted here with sketches from two of Foster's other books, New York by Gas-Light will be welcomed by students of urban social history, popular culture, literature, and journalism. Editor Stuart M. Blumin has provided a penetrating introductory essay that sets Foster's life and work in the contexts of the growing city, the development of the mass-distribution publishing industry, the evolving literary genre of urban sensationalism, and the wider culture of Victorian America. This is an important reintroduction to a significant but neglected work, a prologue to the urban realism that would flourish later in the fiction of Stephen Crane, the painting of George Bellows, and the journalism of Jacob Riis.

New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches

History

Foster, George G. G.

Americas

University of California Press

What did politics and public affairs mean to those generations of Americans who first experienced democratic self-rule? Taking their cue from vibrant political campaigns and very high voter turnouts, historians have depicted the nineteenth century as an era of intense and widespread political enthusiasm. But rarely have these historians examined popular political engagement directly, or within the broader contexts of day-to-day life. In this bold and in-depth look at Americans and their politics, Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin argue for a more complex understanding of the "space" occupied by politics in nineteenth-century American society and culture. Mining such sources as diaries, letters, autobiographies, novels, cartoons, contested-election voter testimony to state legislative committees, and the partisan newspapers of representative American communities ranging from Massachusetts and Georgia to Texas and California, the authors explore a wide range of political actions and attitudes. They consider the enthusiastic commitment celebrated by historians together with various forms of skepticism, conflicted engagement, detachment, and hostility that rarely have been recognized as part of the American political landscape. Rude Republic sets the political parties and their noisy and attractive campaign spectacles, as well as the massive turnout of voters on election day, within the communal social structure and calendar, the local human landscape of farms, roads, and county towns, and the organizational capacities of emerging nineteenth-century institutions. Political action and engagement are set, too, within the tide of events: the construction of the mass-based party system, the gathering crisis over slavery and disunion, and the gradual expansion of government (and of cities) in the post-Civil War era. By placing the question of popular engagement within these broader social, cultural, and historical contexts, the authors bring new understanding to the complex trajectory of American democracy.

Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.

Altschuler, Glenn C.

Princeton University Press

The streetscape - the closely observed, faithfully rendered view of the city's streets, squares, canals, buildings and people - was a new artistic genre of the early modern era, a period in which the city itself was assuming new forms and taking on new roles in Europe and America. This unique book reopens the window of the early city view makers by tracing earlier forms of urban representation in European art into the sudden coalescence of the new genre in Italy and the Low Countries during the middle years of the seventeenth century. It explores the rapid expansion and diffusion of the genre through the eighteenth century, its appeal to such artists as Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto, Francesco Guardi, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and its embrace of a culture of secular improvement more commonly understood through the writings of Enlightenment philosophes. To examine the long history of the genre is to learn much about the early modern city, and to rediscover many beautiful and long-forgotten works of art.

The Encompassing City: Streetscapes in Early Modern Art and Culture

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Manchester University Press

Very nice photographs of a village in New York.

The Short Season of Sharon Springs: Portrait of Another New York

Durlach, Hansi

Blumin, Deborah Adelman

NCROL

Review\n"The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn is a well-told tale: lively and persuasive. It brings questions of religion to the fore in discussing Brooklyn as a suburb of New York even in the years when it was a separate city." -- Deborah Dash Moore, author of Jewish New York\n"An important and fascinating book. Stuart M. Blumin and Glenn C. Altschuler chart Brooklyn's complicated relationship with Manhattan, the behemoth across the East River, and the city's and then borough's struggles to forge its own urban identity. The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn is an instant classic of New York City history" -- Clifton Hood, author of In Pursuit of Privilege\n"Of all the groups responsible for Brooklyn's storied polychromy, among the least studied is its Protestant vanguard. Brooklyn's Anglo-Dutch founders helped end slavery, established splendid cultural institutions, and built Olmsted's greatest park?and then abandoned it all for the suburbs. The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn tells the story of this once formidable people who have left the scene as fully as the Lenape they displaced 400 years ago." -- Thomas J. Campanella, author of Brooklyn\n"Stuart M. Blumin and Glenn C. Altschuler have produced more than a history of Brooklyn. The tensions caused by German Protestants, Irish Roman Catholics, East European Jews, and African Americans from the south describe the basic form of ethnic succession in American cities. Their excellent book is about contemporary America and the immigrants who are bringing change to cities across the nation today." -- Tom Lewis, author of Washington: A History of our National City\n"Anyone interested in history will be fascinated with The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn?an in-depth account of how the little village of Breuckelen transformed into the amazing multicultural borough we know today." -- Martin Lemelman, author of Two Cents Plain\n"Stuart M. Blumin and Glenn C. Altschuler vividly capture Brooklyn's development as a city, bringing to life a mosaic of neighborhoods, vibrant voluntary associations, and churches which provided the foundation for community for the diverse peoples who moved into the city." -- Kyle Roberts, author of Evangelical Gotham\nIn The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn, Stuart M. Blumin and Glenn C. Altschuler tell the story of nineteenth-century Brooklyn's domination by upper- and middle-class Protestants with roots in Puritan New England. This lively history describes the unraveling of the control they wielded as more ethnically diverse groups moved into the "City of Churches" during the twentieth century. 
Before it became a prime American example of urban ethnic diversity, Brooklyn was a lovely and salubrious "town across the river" from Manhattan, celebrated for its churches and upright suburban living. But challenges to this way of life issued from the sheer growth of the city, from new secular institutions―department stores, theaters, professional baseball―and from the licit and illicit attractions of Coney Island, all of which were at odds with post-Puritan piety and behavior. 
Despite these developments, the Yankee-Protestant hegemony largely held until the massive influx of Southern and Eastern European immigrants in the twentieth century. As The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn demonstrates, in their churches, synagogues, and other communal institutions, and on their neighborhood streets, the new Brooklynites established the ethnic mosaic that laid the groundwork for the theory of cultural pluralism, giving it a central place within the American Creed.

The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn: An American Story

Three Hills

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