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The very letters of the two words seem, as they are written, to redden with the blood-stains of unavenged crime. There is Murder in every syllable, and Want, Misery and Pestilence take startling form and crowd upon the imagination as the pen traces the words." So wrote a reporter about Five Points, the most infamous neighborhood in nineteenth-century America, the place where "slumming" was invented. All but forgotten today, Five Points was once renowned the world over. Its handful of streets in lower Manhattan featured America's most wretched poverty, shared by Irish, Jewish, German, Italian, Chinese, and African Americans. It was the scene of more riots, scams, saloons, brothels, and drunke...
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In a desperate attempt to bring the North to the bargaining table and end what was to the South a losing war, Confederate spies in Canada launch a plot to burn New York City on the day after Thanksgiving in 1864. A group of rebel officers, escapees from Union prison camps who had fled to neutral Canada for safety, reach the city by train and, in disguise, take rooms in various hotels in downtown New York. They fail but only because, unknowingly, they use a chemical mixture that requires oxygen. Smoke from the incipient fires they set is quickly discovered and the fires put out. In the dramatic search for the conspirators that follows, only one of them is caught, Robert Cobb Kennedy, a captain from Louisiana. He is tried, convicted and hanged... the last rebel executed by the North before the end of the war. The Man Who Tried to Burn New York won the Douglas Southall Freeman History Award in 1987.
“Jolly fellows,” a term that gained currency in the nineteenth century, referred to those men whose more colorful antics included brawling, heavy drinking, gambling, and playing pranks. Reforms, especially the temperance movement, stigmatized such behavior, but pockets of jolly fellowship continued to flourish throughout the country. Richard Stott scrutinizes and analyzes this behavior to appreciate its origins and meaning. Stott finds that male behavior could be strikingly similar in diverse locales, from taverns and boardinghouses to college campuses and sporting events. He explores the permissive attitudes that thrived in such male domains as the streets of New York City, California d...
The writing of Irish American history has been transformed since the 1960s. This volume demonstrates how scholars from many disciplines are addressing not only issues of emigration, politics, and social class but also race, labor, gender, representation, historical memory, and return (both literal and symbolic) to Ireland. This recent scholarship embraces Protestants as well as Catholics, incorporates analysis from geography, sociology, and literary criticism, and proposes a genuinely transnational framework giving attention to both sides of the Atlantic. This book combines two special issues of the journal Éire-Ireland with additional new material. The contributors include Tyler Anbinder, Thomas J. Archdeacon, Bruce D. Boling, Maurice J. Bric, Mary P. Corcoran, Mary E. Daly, Catherine M. Eagan, Ruth-Ann M. Harris, Diane M. Hotten-Somers, William Jenkins, Patricia Kelleher, Líam Kennedy, Kerby A. Miller, Harvey O'Brien, Matthew J. O'Brien, Timothy M. O'Neil, and Fionnghuala Sweeney.