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New York City epitomizes modernity. Its skyscrapers and neon nightlife, together with its inner-city ghettoes, symbolize all the excitements and tribulations of contemporary urban living. The city is world-famous, a magnet for friends and enemies alike, a fact reinforced by the tragic events of September 2001. But the city's powerful contemporary presence is also built upon a dramatic history. Settled by Dutch traders, seized at gunpoint by an English fleet, its development into a mega-city reveals a story as astounding as any in American history. Home to generations of migrants, an international center of finance and fashion, New York is a world city both entrepreneurial and self-promoting.
Mrs Astor, queen of New York society in the decades before World War I, used her prestige to create a social aristocracy in the city. Mrs Astor's story, told here by Eric Homberger, sheds light on the origins, extravagant lifestyle, and social competitiveness of this aristocracy.
This rich selection of maps, drawings and charts offers a new perspective on the growth of New York, and provides a vivid history of the city.
Homberger focuses on four main characters who played important roles in various reform efforts of the period: Ann Lohman, known as "Madame Restell, the world-renowned medical expert," whose services as an abortionist were partly responsible for the creation of a harshly repressive public policy toward abortion that persisted for more than a century; "Slippery Dick" Connolly, comptroller of New York City, who escaped to Europe with millions of the city's dollars and betrayed his confederates in the Tweed Ring; Dr. Stephen Smith, a young surgeon at Bellevue Hospital, who was able to show that dozens of cases of typhus had originated in a single tenement on East 22nd Street; and Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect-in-chief of Central Park, who brought into reality a concept promoted by the aristocracy for the benefit of rich and poor alike.
A portrait of the diverse literary cultures of New York from its beginnings as a Dutch colony to the present.
In this revisionary study, Barbara Foley challenges prevalent myths about left-wing culture in the Depression-era U.S. Focusing on a broad range of proletarian novels and little-known archival material, the author recaptures an important literature and rewrites a segment of American cultural history long obscured and distorted by the anti-Communist bias of contemporaries and critics. Josephine Herbst, William Attaway, Jack Conroy, Thomas Bell and Tillie Olsen, are among the radical writers whose work Foley reexamines. Her fresh approach to the U.S. radicals' debates over experimentalism, the relation of art to propaganda, and the nature of proletarian literature recasts the relation of write...
This set comprises 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.
In this utterly immersive volume, Mike Wallace captures the swings of prosperity and downturn, from the 1898 skyscraper-driven boom to the Bankers' Panic of 1907, the labor upheaval, and violent repression during and after the First World War. Here is New York on a whole new scale, moving from national to global prominence -- an urban dynamo driven by restless ambition, boundless energy, immigrant dreams, and Wall Street greed. Within the first two decades of the twentieth century, a newly consolidated New York grew exponentially. The city exploded into the air, with skyscrapers jostling for prominence, and dove deep into the bedrock where massive underground networks of subways, water pipes, and electrical conduits sprawled beneath the city to serve a surging population of New Yorkers from all walks of life. New York was transformed in these two decades as the world's second-largest city and now its financial capital, thriving and sustained by the city's seemingly unlimited potential. Wallace's new book matches its predecessor in pure page-turning appeal and takes America's greatest city to new heights.
In this book, Raphael Ingelbien examines how issues of nationhood have affected the works and the reception of several English and Irish poets - Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney. This studyexplores the interactions between post-war English poets and the ways in which they transformed or misread earlier poetic visions of England - Romantic, Georgian, Modernist."