Sabotaging the Civilizers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyce D. Goodfriend
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Immoral Behavior ◽  
Moral Standards ◽  
Rules Set ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter examines how lowly city dwellers confounded their purported benefactors, for example, by violating cardinal points of civility, indulging their appetites at taverns and brothels, or intruding into the exclusive spaces of the well-to-do. Many urban New Yorkers behaved in ways that were contrary to elite expectations and in so doing risked sanctions from those who controlled important resources. Poor people tended to transgress the rules set by gentlemen and engage in immoral behavior. In precarious circumstances, they perpetually did what was necessary to stay afloat, even if it meant flouting the Christian-based moral standards upheld by the elite. This chapter considers how people disdained as nonentities in eighteenth-century New York City, including blacks and prostitutes, contested the dominion of the city's gentlemen and thus diminished the elite's cultural authority.

Becoming Religious Consumers

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyce D. Goodfriend
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
Commercial Products ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Consumer Revolution ◽  
Weekly Newspapers ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter examines how ordinary men and women transposed the consumer mentality engendered in New York City's burgeoning marketplace to the religious sphere. New York's consumer revolution primed churchgoers to cross the threshold between cultural dependence and independence. Beginning in the 1740s and accelerating in subsequent decades, weekly newspapers featured advertisements intended to stimulate cravings for a variety of commercial products. As New Yorkers scanned pages filled with inventories of a widening array of commodities, their appetite for consumer goods increased. This chapter explores how the transformation of New Yorkers into religious consumers influenced the exercise of cultural authority in eighteenth-century New York City.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joyce D. Goodfriend
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Social Hierarchy ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social

This book examines the dynamics of power relations in eighteenth-century New York City by focusing on sites where the elite's cultural authority came under siege. Drawing on multiple strands of evidence and taking into account the perspectives of actors outside polite circles, the book looks at the efforts of gentlemen to set and enforce cultural norms and the responses they encountered from persons of lesser rank such as religiously inspired artisans, wives, servants, the poor, and the enslaved. It shows how gentlemen at the top of the social hierarchy sought to certify their status as persons of distinction qualified to dictate cultural norms. New York's pan-ethnic elite, it suggests, inhabited an exclusive universe where their families put into practice the precepts of politeness delineated by the English gentry.

Bluestockings and Bohemians

2018 ◽  
pp. 575-596
Author(s):  
Edward Whitley
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Similar Pattern ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Literary Community ◽  
New Yorkers ◽  
Central Tension

Poe regularly attended New York City literary salons during the 1840s with women writers referred to as “bluestockings” in an homage to the feminist intellectuals of the eighteenth-century Blue Stockings Society. Poe depended on the salons of bluestocking women to help him access the literary marketplace. Poe’s posthumous career during the 1850s and 1860s followed a similar pattern, as his reputation was linked to a coterie of New Yorkers who modeled themselves on the bohemians of Paris’s Latin Quarter. These bohemian writers, who included Walt Whitman, used Poe as a touchstone for their own work. The various groups of New York writers who claimed Poe during his life and after his death illustrate a central tension in coterie practice: namely, that membership in a literary community both models and informs the fickle nature of the marketplace.

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.

“A Shelter Can Tip the Scales Sometimes”: Disinvestment, Gentrification, and the Neighborhood Politics of Homelessness in 1980s New York City

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 915-931 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel Eisenberg
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Neighborhood Politics ◽  
New Yorkers

In the 1980s, visible homelessness became one of the most pressing problems in New York City. While most New Yorkers expressed sympathy for the homeless, many of them also resisted efforts to site shelters and service facilities in their neighborhoods. But far from being simply a case of NIMBY (not-in-my-back-yard) sentiment, protests over the placement of these facilities arose in the context of decades-long neighborhood movements against urban disinvestment and the beginning of gentrification in some New York City neighborhoods. I argue that understanding this history is crucial to parsing the complex politics of anti-homeless facility protests in the 1980s and to understanding the rise of “quality of life” policies that would govern many neoliberal urban spaces by the 1990s.

The Floating Pool Lady

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann L. Buttenwieser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Projects ◽  
New Yorkers

Why on earth would anyone want to float a pool up the Atlantic coastline to bring it to rest at a pier on the New York City waterfront? This book recounts the author's triumphant adventure that started in the bayous of Louisiana and ended with a self-sustaining, floating swimming pool moored in New York Harbor. When the author decided something needed to be done to help revitalize the New York City waterfront, she reached into the city's nineteenth-century past for inspiration. The author wanted New Yorkers to reestablish their connection to their riverine surroundings and she was energized by the prospect of city youth returning to the Hudson and East rivers. What she didn't suspect was that outfitting and donating a swimming facility for free enjoyment by the public would turn into an almost-Sisyphean task. As the book describes, the author battled for years with politicians and struggled with bureaucrats to bring her “crazy” scheme to fruition. The book retells the improbable process that led to a pool named The Floating Pool Lady tying up to a pier at Barretto Point Park in the Bronx, ready for summer swimmers. Throughout, the book raises consciousness about persistent environmental issues and the challenges of developing a constituency for projects to make cities livable in the twenty-first century. The story functions as both warning and inspiration to those who dare to dream of realizing innovative public projects in the modern urban landscape.

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.

Beyond the Melting Pot 35 Years Later: On the Relevance of a Sociological Classic for the Immigration Metropolis of Today

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Alba
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
African Americans ◽  
York City ◽  
American City ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Sociological Society ◽  
First Time ◽  
New Yorkers ◽  
Accessible Form

The following essays were originally presented at a symposium at the 1998 annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society. The charge to the authors was to revisit Beyond the Melting Pot, the classic statement about ethnicity, race, and the American city, first published in 1963, and to assess how well its interpretations apply to the contemporary immigration metropolis. The commentators included two New Yorkers (Nancy Foner and Philip Kasinitz), since New York City was the terrain of the book, and two non-New Yorkers (Elijah Anderson and Alejandro Portes). Their commentaries touch on many points in the immigration landscape of today, from immigration's impacts on African Americans to immigrant transnationalism, and identify a number of continuities and discontinuities between the contemporary metropolis and that of nearly four decades ago. Further, Nathan Glazer's response provides, for the first time in a widely accessible form, his reflections on how well the book's portrait and predictions have held up. I am grateful to the IMR editor, Lydio Tomasi, and the journal's board for the opportunity to present this symposium to readers.

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