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"This book is a highly personal glimpse into the world of precinct, district, and county politics. It deals with several stripes of the Tammany Tiger and brings into close focus some of the most forceful background figures in New York City's political framework. Primarily, it is a forty-year panorama of Tammany practices and personalities."—from A Stripe of Tammany's TigerIn this fascinating book, first published in 1966, Louis Eisenstein, a Tammany precinct captain from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, sets out with his coauthor Elliot Rosenberg to chronicle the evolution—or rather devolution—of New York City politics through the first seven decades of the twentieth century. Eisenstein imbues his lively narrative with an overarching theme: that personal interactions and good faith between those at all levels of power are of paramount importance both for sustained political success and for competent municipal administration.
"You have seen neglected oxbows, but what do you know of their making or of the training of a yoke of oxen?... What do you know of the rambling shoemakers who came to a farmhouse and stayed until each member of the family was newly shod with leather from the farm's cattle? Have you ever wondered about the processes by which our frontiersmen translated forest land into fields of wheat? What do you know about those two first crops of the pioneers, ashes and maple sugar? What do you know of log houses, of shingle making, bridges, and flax growing, of spinning and weaving cloth for a garment that was homegrown and homemade? Here is folk history, the accumulated memory of old men and women whom t...
When Charles Evans Hughes defeated William Randolph Hearst for the governorship of New York in 1906, the New York State Republican Party was split between the remnants of the rural, conservative Platt political machine in Albany and the forces loyal to the progressive, energetic President and former New York Governor, Teddy Roosevelt. Although Hughes owed his nomination largely to Roosevelt's desire to weaken conservative influences, the aloof and independent governor's moral idealism and legal experience led him to positions more liberal and unyielding than even Roosevelt could endorse.In this thorough study of Hughes's two terms as governor, Robert F. Wesser depicts the tensions of conserv...
Folklorists and lovers of folk songs will delight in this collection of the lyrics of songs sung by settlers of western New York in the middle of the nineteenth century. The manuscript on which this book is based is the most important collection of traditional song-texts, British and American in origin, to survive from its period. Discovered in the 1930s in the attic of Harry S. Douglass in Arcade, New York, it was written by Julia S. and Volney O. Stevens, who transcribed nearly ninety of the songs with which their father, Artemas Stevens, so often entertained them. The Stevens family had come to Wyoming County, New York, from New England in 1836, bringing with them traditional songs and ba...
A significant chapter in the history of American social reform is traced in this skillful account of the rise of the New York penitentiary system at a time when the United States was garnering international acclaim for its penal methods. Beginning with Newgate, an ill-fated institution built in New York City and named after the famous British prison, W. David Lewis describes the development of such well-known institutions as Auburn Prison and Sing Sing, and ends with the establishment of Clinton Prison at Dannemora. In the process, he analyzes the activities and motives of such penal reformers as Thomas Eddy, the Quaker merchant who was chiefly responsible for the founding of the penitentiar...
Sometimes it's not the dead who haunt us. Terrify us. Torment us. It's the living. Dante I've been watching her for two years. Two years I've dominated this college, on and off the court, and she hasn't looked my way once. But, tonight, it's Halloween. And, tonight, she's the one who's getting haunted. Tonight, she's going to find out that she's mine.
At the age of twenty-four, the Rhode Island Quaker Jemima Wilkinson (1752-1819) recovered from a bout of fever with the pronouncement that she had been directed by a vision to preach to a "dying and sinful world." Announcing that Jemima had died and that her body now housed a new spirit, the Publick Universal Friend, this remarkably charismatic-and notably scandal-plagued-woman gathered several hundred followers and settled to the west of Seneca Lake. Although the religious community she founded on a framework of abstinence and friendship did not long survive her, Wilkinson remains a figure of fascination and mystery to this day. Herbert A. Wisbey Jr.'s 1964 biography is the authoritative account of her life, times, and ideals.
Landscape in American Guides and View Books: Visual History of Touring and Travel is vested in the American relationship to landscape and the role guidebooks and view books played in touring and travel experiences, including immigration. Early in the history of the republic, the relationship to landscape turns visual, that is, landscapes inspire artistic responses in the form of written descriptions and visual representations. The predominant element is the scene. From the 1820s on scenic thinking, within an emerging industrial economy, characterizes a major cultural and social development. As immigration increases, within the country and from abroad, publishers and trade groups create souve...
Creator and first president of the New York Central Railroad, Erastus Corning was one of the outstanding American businessmen of the midnineteenth century. Merchant and manufacturer, railroad promoter, land speculator, financier, and politician, he built a fortune from nothing to eight million dollars. In her skillfully written biographical study, Professor Neu tells the story of this man's varied and highly successful career and, in the telling, traces the pattern of domestic mercantile activity in the early and middle years of the past century. Corning is best remembered as the "architect" of the New York Central Railroad, and the author has been particularly successful in explaining the p...
Fiorello LaGuardia is known best as the tempestuous mayor of New York City in the days when Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in the White House. There had been, however, an earlier time, which matched his mayoralty years in sheer drama and perhaps surpassed them in lasting achievement—LaGuardia's years in Congress.He served in the House of Representative almost continuously from 1917 to 1933, representing two ethnically diverse congressional districts: the Fourteenth (Greenwich Village), from 1917 to 1919, and the Twentieth (East Harlem), from 1923 to 1933. Although barred from important committee posts because of his political independence and thus denied from playing a direct role in lawmak...