Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - State & Local - Middle Atlantic (DC, DE, MD, NJ, NY, PA)

In the early twentieth century, an exuberant brand of gifted men and women moved to New York City, not to get rich but to participate in a cultural revolution. For them, the city's immigrant neighborhoods--home to art, poetry, cafes, and cabarets in the European tradition--provided a place where the fancies and forms of a new America could be tested. Some called themselves Bohemians, some members of the avant-garde, but all took pleasure in the exotic, new, and forbidden.

In American Moderns, Christine Stansell tells the story of the most famous of these neighborhoods,...

Even fans of that popular show, one that held viewers captive, may be a bit disheartened to discover that the first thing that pops into minds around the world about New Jersey is a dysfunctional crime family, just an exit or two off the infamous N.J. Turnpike. But there's no need to live in fear that the only culture and history that the state is known for...

In this book, Michael A. Gordon examines the causes and consequences of the tragic and bloody "Orange Riots" that rocked New York City in 1870 and 1871. On July 12 of both years, groups of Irish Catholics clashed with Irish Protestants marching to commemorate the victory of 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne that confirmed the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. The violence of 1870 left eight people dead; the following year, more than sixty died.

Reconstructing the events of July 12 in those years, Gordon provides a riveting and richly detailed account of the riots. He maintains that...

"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...

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...

Site of the world's busiest and most lucrative harbor throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the Port of New York was also the historic preserve of Irish American gangsters, politicians, longshoremen's union leaders, and powerful Roman Catholic pastors. This is the demimonde depicted to stunning effect in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) and into which James T. Fisher takes readers in this remarkable and engaging historical account of the classic film's backstory.

Fisher introduces readers to the real "Father Pete Barry" featured in On the...

Since its publication in 1915, Beliefs and Superstitions of the Pennsylvania Germans has been not only a valuable addition to the catalogue of American folklore but also a vital resource in preserving a linguistic culture and traditions that were already fading from the American consciousness. Edwin Miller Fogel's years of research in both Pennsylvania and Germany led to this collection, the most complete of its time, of more than two thousand Pennsylvania German aphorisms.

This work displays a panorama of beliefs reflecting every aspect of Pennsylvania German life, from...

The Mountain is R. M. S. Jackson's intriguing work on the benefits of a life attuned to nature. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Jackson, a doctor and health enthusiast from Cambria County, Pennsylvania, established a sanitarium called the Allegheny Mountain Health Institute. In this book, he urges his readers to abandon the mobs of the cities and frivolities of leisure for the health and happiness that he attributes to the powers of the Allegheny Mountains. The Mountain is an exemplary study of the Alleghenies, combining an examination of the natural...