The Rise and Fall of Protestant Brooklyn: An American Story

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.