Interzones

Interzones PDF Author: Kevin J. Mumford
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231104920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Interzones is an innovative account of how the color line was drawn--and how it was crossed--in twentieth-century American cities. Kevin Mumford chronicles the role of vice districts in New York and Chicago as crucibles for the shaping of racial categories and racial inequalities. Focusing on Chicago's South Side and Levee districts, and Greenwich Village and Harlem in New York at the height of the Progressive era, Mumford traces the connections between the Great Migration, the commercialization of leisure, and the politics of reform and urban renewal. Interzones is the first book to examine in depth the combined effects on American culture of two major transformations: the migration north of southern blacks and the emergence of a new public consumer culture. Mumford writes an important chapter in Progressive-era history from the perspectives of its most marginalized and dispossessed citizens. Recreating the mixed-race underworlds of brothels and dance halls, and charting the history of a black-white sexual subculture, Mumford shows how fluid race relations were in these "interzones." From Jack Johnson and the "white slavery" scare of the 1910's to the growth of a vital gay subculture and the phenomenon of white slumming, he explores in provocative detail the connections between political reforms and public culture, racial prejudice and sexual taboo, the hardening of the color line and the geography of modern inner cities. The complicated links between race and sex, and reform and reaction, are vividly displayed in Mumford's look at a singular moment in the settling of American culture and society.

Interzones

Interzones PDF Author: Kevin J. Mumford
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231104920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
Interzones is an innovative account of how the color line was drawn--and how it was crossed--in twentieth-century American cities. Kevin Mumford chronicles the role of vice districts in New York and Chicago as crucibles for the shaping of racial categories and racial inequalities. Focusing on Chicago's South Side and Levee districts, and Greenwich Village and Harlem in New York at the height of the Progressive era, Mumford traces the connections between the Great Migration, the commercialization of leisure, and the politics of reform and urban renewal. Interzones is the first book to examine in depth the combined effects on American culture of two major transformations: the migration north of southern blacks and the emergence of a new public consumer culture. Mumford writes an important chapter in Progressive-era history from the perspectives of its most marginalized and dispossessed citizens. Recreating the mixed-race underworlds of brothels and dance halls, and charting the history of a black-white sexual subculture, Mumford shows how fluid race relations were in these "interzones." From Jack Johnson and the "white slavery" scare of the 1910's to the growth of a vital gay subculture and the phenomenon of white slumming, he explores in provocative detail the connections between political reforms and public culture, racial prejudice and sexual taboo, the hardening of the color line and the geography of modern inner cities. The complicated links between race and sex, and reform and reaction, are vividly displayed in Mumford's look at a singular moment in the settling of American culture and society.

The Chinatown Trunk Mystery

The Chinatown Trunk Mystery PDF Author: Mary Ting Yi Lui
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216282
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
In the summer of 1909, the gruesome murder of nineteen-year-old Elsie Sigel sent shock waves through New York City and the nation at large. The young woman's strangled corpse was discovered inside a trunk in the midtown Manhattan apartment of her reputed former Sunday school student and lover, a Chinese man named Leon Ling. Through the lens of this unsolved murder, Mary Ting Yi Lui offers a fascinating snapshot of social and sexual relations between Chinese and non-Chinese populations in turn-of-the-century New York City. Sigel's murder was more than a notorious crime, Lui contends. It was a clear signal that attempts to maintain geographical and social boundaries between the city's Chinese male and white female populations had failed. When police discovered Sigel and Leon Ling's love letters, giving rise to the theory that Leon Ling killed his lover in a fit of jealous rage, this idea became even more embedded in the public consciousness. New Yorkers condemned the work of Chinese missions and eagerly participated in the massive national and international manhunt to locate the vanished Leon Ling. Lui explores how the narratives of racial and sexual danger that arose from the Sigel murder revealed widespread concerns about interracial social and sexual mixing during the era. She also examines how they provoked far-reaching skepticism about regulatory efforts to limit the social and physical mobility of Chinese immigrants and white working-class and middle-class women. Through her thorough re-examination of this notorious murder, Lui reveals in unprecedented detail how contemporary politics of race, gender, and sexuality shaped public responses to the presence of Chinese immigrants during the Chinese exclusion era.

Pursuing Johns

Pursuing Johns PDF Author: Thomas C. Mackey
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814209882
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
In Pursuing Johns, Thomas C. Mackey studies the New York Committee of Fourteen and its members' attempts to influence vagrancy laws in early-20th-century New York City as a way to criminalize men's patronizing of female prostitutes. It sought out and prosecuted the city's immoral hotels, unlicensed bars, opium dens, disorderly houses, and prostitutes. It did so because of the threats to individual "character" such places presented. In the early 1920s, led by Frederick Whitin, the Committee thought that the time had arrived to prosecute the men who patronized prostitutes through what modern parlance calls a "john's law." After a notorious test case failed to convict a philandering millionaire for vagrancy, the only statutory crime available to punish men who patronized prostitutes, the Committee lobbied for a change in the state's criminal law. In the process, this representative of traditional 19th-century purity reform allied with the National Women's Party, the advanced feminists of the 1920s. Their proposed "Customer Amendment" united the moral Right and the feminist Left in an effort to alter and use the state's criminal law to make men moral, defend their character, and improve New York City's overall morality. Mackey's contribution to the literature is unique. Instead of looking at how vice commissions targeted female prostitutes or the commerce supporting and surrounding them, Mackey concentrates on how men were scrutinized. Book jacket.

The Survey

The Survey PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Charities
Languages : en
Pages : 940

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Book Description


City of Eros

City of Eros PDF Author: Timothy J. Gilfoyle
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393311082
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
Winner of the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians and the New York State Historical Association Manuscript Prize.

Gay New York

Gay New York PDF Author: George Chauncey
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786723351
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 682

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Book Description
The award-winning, field-defining history of gay life in New York City in the early to mid-20th century Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Drawing on a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, George Chauncey constructs a fascinating portrait of a vibrant, cohesive gay world that is not supposed to have existed. Called "monumental" (Washington Post), "unassailable" (Boston Globe), "brilliant" (The Nation), and "a first-rate book of history" (The New York Times), Gay New Yorkforever changed how we think about the history of gay life in New York City, and beyond.

Inventing Times Square

Inventing Times Square PDF Author: William R. Taylor
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801853371
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
A unique volume, Inventing Times Square approaches the subject of twentieth-century American city culture through a multidimensional examination of one quintessential urban space: Times Square. Ranging in time from 1905, when the crossroad was given its present name, through to the current plans for redevelopment, the authors examine Times Square as economic hub, real estate bonanza, entertainment center, advertising medium, architectural experiment, and erotic netherworld. Though the volume centers on Times Square, the essays venture much further into urban history and American social history, revealing in the process how Times Square reflected—even epitomized—America as it became an urban consumer culture.

Life and Labor

Life and Labor PDF Author: Charles Stephenson
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780887061721
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Life and Labor brings together the most stimulating scholarship in the field of labor history today. Its fifteen essays explore the impact of industrialization and technology on the lives of working people and their responses to the changes in society over the past one-hundred-fifty years. Focusing on the everyday life of working-class Americans, it discusses such topics as production technology, occupational mobility, industrial violence, working women, resistance to exploitation, fraternal organizations, and social and leisure-time activities. The essays are written in a lively manner accessible to an undergraduate audience and also provide insights and a solid background for graduate students and scholars in the field of American labor and social history. The book presents the work of members of the generation of labor and social historians who matured in the 1970s and who are now establishing themselves as leaders in their fields.

The Girl Problem

The Girl Problem PDF Author: Ruth M. Alexander
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801485770
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
During the Progressive Era, young working-class women were sometimes jailed for engaging in social and sexual activities that signaled their rejection of Victorian moral standards. These disadvantaged "delinquents" were subject to legal sanctions that were rarely applied to rebellious middle-class girls. As she traces the history of a social crisis that came to be known as the "girl problem", Ruth M. Alexander reconstructs the stories of individual women incarcerated in reformatories who helped redefine female adolescence in the United States. Alexander draws on the rich case files of reformatories at Bedford Hills and Albion, New York. Bringing together writings by the young inmates, letters from their parents, and institutional records, she follows the histories of a hundred girls as they run afoul of the law, are incarcerated, and struggle to reenter society. From the interplay among girls, families, courts, and penal institutions emerges a fascinating picture of class inequality and culture conflict. Alexander finds that most delinquent young women eventually accepted the idea that freedom was best won by conformity and accommodation. In showing how a new social problem was identified and tackled, Alexander also documents the emergence of the modern professions of social work and mental hygiene. Reenacting a key chapter in the transformation of adolescence, The "Girl Problem" contributes to the history of sexuality and social reform through the Progressive Era and beyond.

Crimes against Children

Crimes against Children PDF Author: Stephen Robertson
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876488
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
In the first half of the twentieth century, Americans' intense concern with sex crimes against children led to a wave of public discussion, legislative action, and criminal prosecution. Stephen Robertson provides the first large-scale, long-term study of how American criminal courts dealt with the prosecution of sexual violence against children. Robertson describes how the nineteenth-century approach to childhood as a single phase of innocence began to shift at the end of the century to include several stages of childhood development, prompting reformers to create legal categories such as statutory rape and carnal abuse to protect children. However, while ordinary New Yorkers' involvement in the prosecution of those offenses reshaped their understandings of who was a child and produced a new concern to establish the age of their sexual partners, their beliefs in childhood innocence and in a concept of sexuality centered on sexual intercourse remained unchanged. As a result, families' use of the law and jurors' decisions ultimately diminished the protection the new laws offered to children. Robertson's study, based on the previously unexamined files of the New York County district attorney's office, reveals the importance of child sexuality and sex crimes in twentieth-century American culture.