Changing Strategies for Child Welfare, Enduring Beliefs about Childhood: The Fresh Air Fund, 1877–1926

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-70
Author(s):  
Julia Guarneri
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Child Welfare ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
York City ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Welfare Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fresh Air Fund ◽  
New Yorkers

In 1877, a Congregational pastor started a modest effort to send New York City tenement children on two-week summer vacations in country homes. The pastor's Fresh Air Fund grew, in the following decades, into a hugely popular program and a celebrated cause. The charity thrived in part because its simple project adapted well to several different reform environments. The fund made a place for itself in the evangelical child-saving efforts of the Gilded Age, the civic-minded reforms of the Progressive Era, and the more individualistic pursuits of the 1920s. In each era, fund leaders cast country vacations as simple means to address middle-class New Yorkers' fears about their changing city, from the influx of immigrants to the spread of disease to rising class tensions.Tracking the Fresh Air Fund over fifty years reveals the sea changes in child-welfare work between 1877 and 1927, but it also calls attention to continuities often overlooked in the history of child welfare. Throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the fund tapped supporters' constant and deep-seated beliefs in children's potential, the restorative power of the outdoors, and a child's right to play.

Tonic for Body or Soul: Fresh Air for Poor Children in Progressive Era New York City

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422110404
Author(s):  
Marika Plater
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
York City ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Urban Air ◽  
Familial Bonds ◽  
Poor Children ◽  
Fresh Air Fund

The Fresh Air Fund and the Floating Hospital were two charities that launched in Gilded Age New York City and flourished during the Progressive Era. Part of the fresh air charity movement, both organizations argued that impoverished children living in crowded tenement districts needed fresher air. But these reformers had strikingly different notions of what fresh air was and where to find it. The Floating Hospital cast fresh air as medicine that children could breathe in the city’s harbor, but urban air could never be fresh to the Fresh Air Fund. Using fresh air as a symbol of rural wholesomeness in contrast to urban deviance, the organization aimed to mold children into model citizens by exposing them to the countryside. Diverging ideas about cities and air impacted children’s experiences, determining whether charities treated them equally regardless of race or sex and whether reformers respected or tried to break familial bonds.

Suffrage and the City

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren C. Santangelo
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
York City ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
The City ◽  
Physical Layout

Suffrage and the City: New York Women Battle for the Ballot uncovers the ways in which the demand for women’s rights intersected with the history, politics, and culture of New York City in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The city—its mores, rhythms, and physical layout—helped to shape what was possible for suffragists campaigning within it. At the same time, these activists helped to redefine the urban experience, especially for white, middle-class women. The fight for the vote in the nation’s largest metropolis demanded that suffragists both mobilize and contest urban etiquette, as they worked to gain visibility and underscore their cause’s respectability. Suffrage and the City demonstrates that the Big Apple was more than just a stage for suffrage action; it was part of the drama.

The Freethinker, the Jews, and the Missionaries: George Houston and the Mystery of Israel Vindicated

AJS Review ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 101-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Sarna
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
First Time ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
New Yorkers

In 1820, a volume entitled Israel Vindicated, written by "An Israelite," was published in New York City. It was the first Jewish polemic composed in response to the founding of a missionary society, the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews, and it remained influential throughout the nineteenth century. The author of this work, however, has never been identified. Nor has the volume itself received the attention it deserves. This article attempts to fill both of these lacunae.Section one describes and analyzes Israel Vindicated. It places the work within the context of its times, and compares it to other, more traditional anti-Christian polemics. Section two outlines the postpublication history of Israel Vindicated. Soon after it appeared, some New Yorkers attempted to have the work banned, and its author exposed and punished. Later, the work was variously invoked by Jews and Judeophobes alike, though, of course, for different purposes. In section three, the author of Israel Vindicated assumes center stage. A review of old and new evidence leads to the conclusion that the work flowed from the pen of freethinker George Houston, assisted probably by his Jewish printer, Abraham Collins. Finally, section four analyzes the motivations of George Houston and his Jewish supporters. As is shown, this was far from the first time that Jews joined forces temporarily with other, sometimes hostile minority groups in pursuit of self-interest. Adversity makes strange bedfellows.

The Freethinker, the Jews, and the Missionaries: George Houston and the Mystery of Israel Vindicated

AJS Review ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 101-114
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Sarna
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
First Time ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
New Yorkers

In 1820, a volume entitled Israel Vindicated, written by "An Israelite," was published in New York City. It was the first Jewish polemic composed in response to the founding of a missionary society, the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews, and it remained influential throughout the nineteenth century. The author of this work, however, has never been identified. Nor has the volume itself received the attention it deserves. This article attempts to fill both of these lacunae.Section one describes and analyzes Israel Vindicated. It places the work within the context of its times, and compares it to other, more traditional anti-Christian polemics. Section two outlines the postpublication history of Israel Vindicated. Soon after it appeared, some New Yorkers attempted to have the work banned, and its author exposed and punished. Later, the work was variously invoked by Jews and Judeophobes alike, though, of course, for different purposes. In section three, the author of Israel Vindicated assumes center stage. A review of old and new evidence leads to the conclusion that the work flowed from the pen of freethinker George Houston, assisted probably by his Jewish printer, Abraham Collins. Finally, section four analyzes the motivations of George Houston and his Jewish supporters. As is shown, this was far from the first time that Jews joined forces temporarily with other, sometimes hostile minority groups in pursuit of self-interest. Adversity makes strange bedfellows.

scholarly journals Dendroarchaeological analysis of the Terminal Warehouse in New York City reveals a history of long-distance timber transport during the Gilded Age

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 103114
Author(s):  
Caroline Leland ◽  
Mukund Palat Rao ◽  
Edward R. Cook ◽  
Benjamin I. Cook ◽  
Bryan M. Lapidus ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Timber Transport

Messy, Energetic, Intense: A Roundtable Conversation among New York's Asian American Experimental Filmmakers of the Eighties with Roddy Bogawa, Daryl Chin, Shu Lea Cheang, and Rea Tajiri

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 66-78
Author(s):  
Vince Schleitwiler ◽  
Abby Sun ◽  
Rea Tajiri
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Asian American ◽  
York City ◽  
American Film ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
History Of

This roundtable grew out of conversations between filmmaker Rea Tajiri, programmer Abby Sun, and scholar Vince Schleitwiler about a misunderstood chapter in the history of Asian American film and media: New York City in the eighties, a vibrant capital of Asian American filmmaking with a distinctively experimental edge. To tell this story, Rea Tajiri contacted her artist contemporaries Shu Lea Cheang and Roddy Bogawa as well as writer and critic Daryl Chin. Daryl had been a fixture in New York City art circles since the sixties, his presence central to Asian American film from the beginning. The scope of this discussion extends loosely from the mid-seventies through the late nineties, with Tajiri, Abby Sun, and Vince Schleitwiler initiating topics, compiling responses, and finalizing its form as a collage-style conversation.

Nearly Got Shot Dead, and He Didn’t Get His Little Check Yet: Workers, Crime, and Law and Order in New York City, 1962-1970

2021 ◽  
pp. 009614422199964
Author(s):  
Glenn Dyer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
York City ◽  
Important Research ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Management Conflicts ◽  
High Crime ◽  
New Yorkers

Historians have conducted important research on the rise of law-and-order politics in New York City, where anxieties over women’s freedoms, political battles over police oversight, and crime impacts in poor communities contributed to its rise. The numerous walkouts, negotiations, and worker-management conflicts around high-crime areas in New York City suggest that the question of law and order was a salient workplace issue as well for the members of Communication Workers of America Local 1101. In their case, such concerns predate the rhetorical rise of law and order and help us better understand why such politics found fertile ground among working-class New Yorkers, white and black. Repeated incidences, largely in the city’s black ghettoes, prompted workers with a strong class consciousness and commitment to solidarity to transform the problems and experiences of individual workers into a shared question to be addressed via collective action.

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