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"New York (State) Social conditions 19th century."
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Five Points : the 19th-century New York City neighborhood that invented tap dance, stole elections, and became the world's most notorious slum
Five Points (an intersection in lower Manhattan formed when Anthony Street was extended to meet Orange and Cross-today's Baxter and North Streets), was the most infamous neighborhood in nineteenth-century America. Visitors from Charles Dickens to Abraham Lincoln flocked to Five Points to witness the filthy streets, bordellos, gambling dens, and tenements that housed the lowest of the low. A close look at Five Points reveals a hidden world. As one of the most ethnically varied areas in the nation's most diverse city, The Five Points story is a classic American example of immigrant energy and ambition. From \"Bowery Boy\" culture to the invention of tap dance, to the most famous prize-fight of the century, to the timeless photographs of Jacob Riis, Five Points illuminates the colorful history of a fascinating community.
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Black Gotham
Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative,Black Gothamis Carla Peterson's riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbors, and business associates, she illuminates the greater history of African-American elites in New York City.
Black Gothamchallenges many of the accepted \"truths\" about African-American history, including the assumption that the phrase \"nineteenth-century black Americans\" means enslaved people, that \"New York state before the Civil War\" refers to a place of freedom, and that a black elite did not exist until the twentieth century. Beginning her story in the 1820s, Peterson focuses on the pupils of the Mulberry Street School, the graduates of which went on to become eminent African-American leaders. She traces their political activities as well as their many achievements in trade, business, and the professions against the backdrop of the expansion of scientific racism, the trauma of the Civil War draft riots, and the rise of Jim Crow.
Told in a vivid, fast-paced style,Black Gothamis an important account of the rarely acknowledged achievements of nineteenth-century African Americans and brings to the forefront a vital yet forgotten part of American history and culture.
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Plentiful country : the great potato famine and the making of Irish New York
Uncover the gripping narrative of Irish immigrants who transformed America in the aftermath of the Great Hunger. Tyler Anbinder's landmark work exposes the grit and resilience of the Famine Irish, defying hardship to redefine the American dream. From the bustling streets of New York to the heart of a nation in the middle of change, the compelling journey of these unrecognised heroes is unveiled, painting a vibrant scene of hope that echoes through the heart of America. A captivating testament to courage and perseverance, this book is a must-read, illuminating a pivotal chapter in the making of modern America, a testament to the enduring spirit that forged a new home in the land of opportunity.
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Before Harlem
In the years between 1880 and 1915, New York City and its environs underwent a tremendous demographic transformation with the arrival of millions of European immigrants, native whites from the rural countryside, and people of African descent from both the American South and the Caribbean. While all groups faced challenges in their adjustment to the city, hardening racial prejudices set the black experience apart from that of other newcomers. Through encounters with each other, blacks and whites, both together and in opposition, forged the contours of race relations that would affect the city for decades to come.Before Harlemreveals how black migrants and immigrants to New York entered a world far less welcoming than the one they had expected to find. White police officers, urban reformers, and neighbors faced off in a hostile environment that threatened black families in multiple ways. Unlike European immigrants, who typically struggled with low-paying jobs but who often saw their children move up the economic ladder, black people had limited employment opportunities that left them with almost no prospects of upward mobility. Their poverty and the vagaries of a restrictive job market forced unprecedented numbers of black women into the labor force, fundamentally affecting child-rearing practices and marital relationships. Despite hostile conditions, black people nevertheless claimed New York City as their own. Within their neighborhoods and their churches, their night clubs and their fraternal organizations, they forged discrete ethnic, regional, and religious communities. Diverse in their backgrounds, languages, and customs, black New Yorkers cultivated connections to others similar to themselves, forming organizations, support networks, and bonds of friendship with former strangers. In doing so, Marcy S. Sacks argues, they established a dynamic world that eventually sparked the Harlem Renaissance. By the 1920s, Harlem had become both a tragedy and a triumph-undeniably a ghetto replete with problems of poverty, overcrowding, and crime, but also a refuge and a haven, a physical place whose very name became legendary.
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Stories of Freedom in Black New York
Stories of Freedom in Black New York recreates the experience of black New Yorkers as they moved from slavery to freedom. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, New York City's black community strove to realize what freedom meant, to find a new sense of itself, and, in the process, created a vibrant urban culture. Through exhaustive research, Shane White imaginatively recovers the raucous world of the street, the elegance of the city's African American balls, and the grubbiness of the Police Office. It allows us to observe the style of black men and women, to watch their public behavior, and to hear the cries of black hawkers, the strident music of black parades, and the sly stories of black conmen. Taking center stage in this story is the African Company, a black theater troupe that exemplified the new spirit of experimentation that accompanied slavery's demise. For a few short years in the 1820s, a group of black New Yorkers, many of them ex-slaves, challenged pervasive prejudice and performed plays, including Shakespearean productions, before mixed race audiences. Their audacity provoked feelings of excitement and hope among blacks, but often of disgust by many whites for whom the theater's existence epitomized the horrors of emancipation.Stories of Freedom in Black New York brilliantly intertwines black theater and urban life into a powerful interpretation of what the end of slavery meant for blacks, whites, and New York City itself. White's story of the emergence of free black culture offers a unique understanding of emancipation's impact on everyday life, and on the many forms freedom can take.
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Talk with You Like a Woman
With this book, Cheryl Hicks brings to light the voices and viewpoints of black working-class women, especially southern migrants, who were the subjects of urban and penal reform in early-twentieth-century New York. Hicks compares the ideals of racial uplift and reform programs of middle-class white and black activists to the experiences and perspectives of those whom they sought to protect and, often, control.In need of support as they navigated the discriminatory labor and housing markets and contended with poverty, maternity, and domestic violence, black women instead found themselves subject to hostility from black leaders, urban reformers, and the police. Still, these black working-class women struggled to uphold their own standards of respectable womanhood. Through their actions as well as their words, they challenged prevailing views regarding black women and morality in urban America. Drawing on extensive archival research, Hicks explores the complexities of black working-class women's lives and illuminates the impact of racism and sexism on early-twentieth-century urban reform and criminal justice initiatives.
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Where the light enters
\"Dr. Sophie Savard, daughter of free people of color returns home to the achingly familiar rhythms of Manhattan in the early spring of 1884 to rebuild her life after the death of her husband. With the help of Dr. Anna Savard, her dearest friend, cousin, and fellow physician she plans to continue her work aiding the disadvantaged women society would rather forget. As Sophie sets out to construct a new life for herself, Anna's husband, Detective-Sergeant Jack Mezzanotte calls on them both to consult on two new cases: the wife of a prominent banker has disappeared into thin air, and the corpse of a young woman is found with baffling wounds that suggest a killer is on the loose. In New York it seems that the advancement of women has brought out the worst in some men. Unable to ignore the plight of New York's less fortunate, these intrepid cousins draw on all resources to protect their patients\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Shirts Powdered Red
Beginning with a purchased shirt and ending with a
handmade dress, Shirts Powdered
Red shows how Haudenosaunee women and their
work shaped their nations from the sixteenth century through the
nineteenth century.
By looking at clothing that was bought, created, and remade,
Maeve Kane brings to life how Haudenosaunee women used access to
global trade to maintain a distinct and enduring Haudenosaunee
identity in the face of colonial pressures to assimilate and
disappear. Drawing on rich oral, archival, material, visual, and
quantitative evidence, Shirts Powdered Red tells the story
of how Haudenosaunee people worked to maintain their nations'
cultural and political sovereignty through selective engagement
with trade and the rhetoric of civility, even as Haudenosaunee
clothing and gendered labor increasingly became the focus of
colonial conversion efforts throughout the upheavals and
dispossession of the nineteenth century.
Shirts Powdered Red offers a sweeping, detailed
cultural history of three centuries of Haudenosaunee women's labor
and their agency to shape their nations' future.
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