Dan Horner. Taking to the Streets: Crowds, Politics, and the Urban Experience in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Montreal, Montréal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020, 311 p.
Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.
I am pleased to introduce Boyhood Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1. This issue’s
authors unanimously invite an appreciation of the many regional, temporal
and contextual inflections of manliness-in-the-making. After all: “Among
boys, as among men, there are ‘all sorts and conditions;’ environment
moulds them” (Anon. 1890: 147). This merits a bit of intercontinental timetravel.
Ecce puer: from Lord Baden-Powell’s and American contemporaries’
middle ages to late nineteenth-century Mexico’s French Third Republic,
back to Baden-Powell and into the Great War, and back again to presentday
Mexico. In Mexico, on both visits, we are travelling back and forth as
well, between the rural and urban experience.
By the closing decades of the nineteenth century the continued and rapid growth of cities had given rise to acute problems of municipal policy on both sides of the Atlantic. America had come to its urban experience relatively late – the population of Chicago at the time the Liverpool & Manchester Railway opened was 50 people – but between 1880 and 1910 the critical shift had taken place in the United States to a population which was over 50 per cent urban. The fifty million town dwellers in America not merely outnumbered the whole population of the UK, but included a large number of recent immigrants from the poorer, non-English speaking countries.
Island Doctor: John Mackieson and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Prince Edward Island David A. E. ShephardIsland Doctor: John Mackieson and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Prince Edward Island David A. E. Shephard Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003, xxviii + 187 p., $44.95 (cloth)