This collection of newly commissioned critical essays reads across and between New Yorker departments, from sports writing to war journalism, short stories to reporters at large, poetry to annals of ...business. Attending to the relations between these kinds of writing and the magazine’s visual and material constituents, the collection examines the distinctive ways in which imaginative writing has inhabited the ‘prime real estate’ of this enormously influential periodical. The book brings together a range of sharply angled analyses of particular authors, styles, columns, and pages, so fostering multiple perspectives on American writing and periodical culture at specific moments in twentieth- and twenty-first-century history.
The Dutch colony of New Netherland in the seventeenth century enjoyed a greater diversity of religious beliefs than any of the English colonies in America at the time, except possibly Rhode Island. ...George L. Procter-Smith has investigated the background and reasons for this religious diversity and toleration despite the legal establishment of the Dutch Reformed Church. All colonies have to be understood in terms of their mother country; but, Procter-Smith insists, the European background is especially important in the study of New Netherland. He devotes about half the book to the religious situation in the Netherlands and the de facto toleration that existed despite the state church. The Dutch colony in America was founded for trade, not for religious reasons which were so prominent in the neighboring English colonies. As the Dutch directors of the West India Company, the colony's proprietor, tried to recruit settlers, they realized that intolerance and religious persecution would keep many prospective settlers away. Consequently, they paid lip service to the Dutch Reformed establishment but in practice allowed dissenters to practice their religion in private. Procter-Smith has written a clear, persuasive account of religion and politics, as shaped by the Dutch trading interests, in both Europe and New Netherland.— Review for Religious: A Journal of Catholic Spirituality
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.
James Tanner may be the most famous person in nineteenth-century America that no one has heard of. During his service in the Union army, he lost the lower third of both his legs and afterward had to ...reinvent himself. After a brush with fame as the stenographer taking down testimony a few feet away from the dying President Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, Tanner eventually became one of the best-known men in Gilded Age America. He was a highly placed Republican operative, a popular Grand Army of the Republic speaker, an entrepreneur, and a celebrity. He earned fame and at least temporary fortune as "Corporal Tanner," but most Americans would simply have known him as "The Corporal." Yet virtually no one-not even historians of the Civil War and Gilded Age- knows him today.
America's Corporalrectifies this startling gap in our understanding of the decades that followed the Civil War. Drawing on a variety of primary sources including memoirs, lectures, newspapers, pension files, veterans' organization records, poetry, and political cartoons, James Marten brings Tanner's life and character into focus and shows what it meant to be a veteran- especially a disabled veteran-in an era that at first worshipped the saviors of the Union but then found ambiguity in their political power and insistence on collecting ever-larger pensions. This biography serves as an examination of the dynamics of disability, the culture and politics of the Gilded Age, and the aftereffects of the Civil War, including the philosophical and psychological changes that it prompted.
The book explores the sometimes corrupt, often gridlocked, but always entertaining politics of the era, from Tanner's days as tax collector in Brooklyn through his short-lived appointment as commissioner of pensions (one of the biggest jobs in the federal government of the 1880s). Marten provides a vivid case study of a classic Gilded Age entrepreneur who could never make enough money.America's Corporalis a reflection on the creation of celebrity-and of its ultimate failure to preserve the memory of a man who represented so many of the experiences and assumptions of the Gilded Age.
David I. Spanagel explores the origins of American geology and the culture that helped give it rise, focusing on Amos Eaton, the educator and amateur scientist who founded the Rensselaer School, and ...on DeWitt Clinton, the masterful politician who led the movement for the Erie Canal. DeWitt Clinton and Amos Eaton shows how a cluster of assumptions about the peculiar landscape and entrepreneurial spirit of New York came to define the Empire State.
Spanagel sheds light on a particularly innovative and fruitful period of interplay among science, politics, art, and literature in American history. New Yorkers' romantic views of natural majesty and ideas about improving the land influenced scientific ideas and other features of contemporary culture. The life of Amos Eaton provides a lens through which readers gain fresh awareness of scientific knowledge, economic planning, and cultural values during the first half of the nineteenth century. Scientists of the time were fascinated by questions such as: How old is the earth? When did time begin? How might the passage of time have shaped and reshaped the original landscape?
In the United States, New Yorkers of the mid-1820s mounted the most concerted effort to find answers to these large questions of natural history. Both geographic conditions and historical forces led Amos Eaton and his wealthy patron Stephen Van Rensselaer to open the Rensselaer School at Troy, New York, in 1826. Eaton thus gave America its first generation of professional scientists, many of whom formed professional organizations and standards of practice still active today.
Deeply researched, this book will interest historians of nineteenth-century American arts and science, politics, and technological development.
Seattle's first black resident was a sailor named Manuel Lopes
who arrived in 1858 and became the small community's first barber.
He left in the early 1870s to seek economic prosperity elsewhere,
but ...as Seattle transformed from a stopover town to a full-fledged
city, African Americans began to stay and build a community. By the
early twentieth century, black life in Seattle coalesced in the
Central District, a four-square-mile section east of downtown.
Black Seattle, however, was never a monolith. Through world wars,
economic booms and busts, and the civil rights movement, black
residents and leaders negotiated intragroup conflicts and had
varied approaches to challenging racial inequity. Despite these
differences, they nurtured a distinct African American culture and
black urban community ethos. With a new foreword and afterword,
this second edition of The Forging of a Black Community is
essential to understanding the history and present of the largest
black community in the Pacific Northwest.
The death of old man Rice Friedland, Martin
The death of old man Rice,
c1994, 19960807, 1996, 2000, 1996-01-01
eBook
The Death of Old Man Rice is a murder mystery and murder history, a glimpse into the world of forensic science, and that rare book that can engage any reader.
In Spaces of Enslavement, Andrea C. Mosterman addresses the persistent myth that the colonial Dutch system of slavery was more humane. Investigating practices of enslavement in New Netherland and ...then in New York, Mosterman shows that these ways of racialized spatial control held much in common with the southern plantation societies. In the 1620s, Dutch colonial settlers brought slavery to the banks of the Hudson River and founded communities from New Amsterdam in the south to Beverwijck near the terminus of the navigable river. When Dutch power in North America collapsed and the colony came under English control in 1664, Dutch descendants continued to rely on enslaved labor. Until 1827, when slavery was abolished in New York State, slavery expanded in the region, with all free New Yorkers benefitting from that servitude. Mosterman describes how the movements of enslaved persons were controlled in homes and in public spaces such as workshops, courts, and churches. She addresses how enslaved people responded to regimes of control by escaping from or modifying these spaces so as to expand their activities within them. Through a close analysis of homes, churches, and public spaces, Mosterman shows that, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the region's Dutch communities were engaged in a daily struggle with Black New Yorkers who found ways to claim freedom and resist oppression. Spaces of Enslavement writes a critical and overdue chapter on the place of slavery and resistance in the colony and young state of New York.
This pathbreaking synthesis of history, anthropology, and linguistics gives an unprecedented view of the first two hundred years of the Spanish colonization of the Yucatec Maya. Drawing on an ...extraordinary range and depth of sources, William F. Hanks documents for the first time the crucial role played by language in cultural conquest: how colonial Mayan emerged in the age of the cross, how it was taken up by native writers to become the language of indigenous literature, and how it ultimately became the language of rebellion against the system that produced it.Converting Wordsincludes original analyses of the linguistic practices of both missionaries and Mayas-as found in bilingual dictionaries, grammars, catechisms, land documents, native chronicles, petitions, and the forbidden Maya Books ofChilam Balam.Lucidly written and vividly detailed, this important work presents a new approach to the study of religious and cultural conversion that will illuminate the history of Latin America and beyond, and will be essential reading across disciplinary boundaries.
