Product Description
The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago was more than a display of American ingenuity. African Americans--among them Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and George Washington Carver--hoped the fair would help fulfill the dream of true emancipation by including them as full participants in this historic event. Instead they were snubbed. Reed's book vividly recounts their pathos and joy, disappointment and hope. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

nice idea, badly written
I agree with the earlier reviewer that Reed shows that blacks did participate in the Columbian Exposition of 1893, but to get to this point, the reader has to wade through some of the worst sentences I have ever read.I had to stop every 10 minutes or so to try to figure out what he meant to say and to give myself a break.The book should have been condensed to an article.The chapter on the Haitian exhibit, for example, is only 6.5 pages long, spends three of those talking about Frederick Douglass, and in general seems like an afterthought. I don't think Reed ever clearly says what he is trying to prove, (despite the fact that he has about three introductions purporting to do so), you have to get his points through osmosis. Quite frankly this is one of the worst written books I have ever read, however good his ideas and research may be.I do not recommend it. I would not normally write such a scathing review but if I bought the book based on what the previous reviewer said I would be sorely disappointed.

African Americans in the Chicago World's Fair of 1893
Christopher Reed has made another wonderful contribution to the historical scholarship. The current book is a very well-researched, compellingly argued refutation of the claim made by some contemporaries of the World'sColumbian Exhibition of 1893 that African American participation in theevent was very limited. Reed has shown that many blacks--both well-knownand anonymous--attended the world's fair in various capacities. Thephotographs reinforce this point also. Reed further contends that the veryhigh stature of Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Ferdinand Barnett, and I.Garland Penn, the authors of an 1893 booklet called The Reason Why theColored American Is Not Present in the World's Columbian Exposition, andthe attention which the work drew from historians has led many toerroneously believe that there was virtually no black participation in theaforementioned event. ... Read more

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Island Sounds in the Global City maps the musical "Caribbeanization" of New York City, now home to the largest and most diverse concentrations of Caribbean people in the world. Emphasizing the relationship of music to social identity, this volume surveys a rich mosaic of popular Caribbean styles, showing how these musics serve the dual function of defining a group's uniqueness and creating bridges across ethnic boundaries.

While Dominicans in Washington Heights think of merengue as their music and El Barrio's Nuyoricans (New York-born people of Puerto Rican descent) identify most closely with salsa, many Latin dance bands play both merengue and salsa, often for the same audience. Brooklyn's Trinidadian community cherishes its calypso and steel pan music, while the borough's Jamaican residents claim reggae as their most significant artistic achievement--yet both are components of Brooklyn's West Indian Carnival. Haitian folkloric troupes often include non-Haitian performers and play for mixed audiences.

As early as the 1940s, Greenwich Village clubs offered a variety of Latin and West Indian musicians an opportunity to perform for white and black North American audiences. Today, New York plays a pivotal role, via its sophisticated media resources, in providing Caribbean musicians with a global audience for their music. ... Read more

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In the spirit of Verlyn Klinkenborg's The Last Fine Time and Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Colored People, this book reveals how Americans once balanced the demands of modern life with a feeling of community--and how we might do so again. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

well written but not scholarly- like a good novel
It is a common cliche that Americans were more orderly, more community-minded, and less individualistic in the 1950s.Ehrenhalt shows how this was so by skillfully examining three Chicago communities: one white working-class urban neighborhood dominated by the Catholic church, a poor African-American neighborhood dominated by a few business leaders and the black church, and a middle-class white suburb dominated by PTAs and similar neighborhood-based community groups.His portrait of those neighborhoods, like a good novel, is readable and feels right.

Ehrenhalt suggests that in all three neighborhoods, people had fewer choices than today, but were perhaps happier and were certainly more community-minded.People did business with local businesses, and had more social ties with people who lived nearby.

According to Ehrenhalt, informal social authority was stronger than today: Americans were more likely to follow their neighbors or local institutions such as public schools, and less likely to follow their own instincts or the regulations of a centralized state.Certainly this is true in some respects: for example, the Catholic Church was far stronger than today.

On the negative side, these institutions were often arbitrary.For example, the sadistic parochial school nun or public school principal is a common figure in pop culture. Why was this so?And why did Americans revolt against it?Ehrenhalt, like a reporter, picks and chooses the stories that fit his mold- so as a result he gives no persuasive answers.

But he does give us some interesting speculation.For example, he suggests that low-level authority figures really were overly strict and arbitrary, causing some of the Baby Boom's rebellion.Ehrenhalt blames such petty tyranny on (a) the possibility that many teachers and priests were scarred by WW 2 and the Great Depression, and (b) the possibility that they were simply overwhelmed by the size of Baby Boom schools and classrooms, and needed to be harsh to maintain order.

Ehrenhalt also points out that even in suburbs, people had much less privacy than they do today.Not only were suburban houses small, but their floor plans tended to maximize public space at the expense of privacy- perhaps explaining Baby Boomers' mania for privacy and "personal space."

This book's descriptions of America today are less sure-footed than its discussion of the past.For example, Ehrenhalt writes that in the 1950s, "most of us in America, grown-ups as well as children, believed in the existence of 'mean guys.'Today, that concept nearly always disappears in the first few years of school, replaced with a vague discomfort with the broader evils of the modern civilized world."Oh, please!Today's America is obsessed with "mean guys"; Americans seclude their children indoors to keep them away from "mean guy" pedophiles, and we redefine our civil liberties to stop "mean guy" Islamists.Ehrenhalt's view of America may fit the NPR-listening Loony Left, but not the terrified majority.

The Way We Never Were
Misty water colored memories for an America that never existed by an entirely forgettable writer.

no title
For a book I started out relishing in, by the end I was most thoroughly disallusioned and thought Ehrenhalt had, perversely, disproved most of his own conclusions.And he leaves out so much.His sense of 1957 seems to come from advertising, which is an always distorted picture of real life.He never mentions the emergence of Elvis Presley or Hugh Heffner as the earthquakes to our culture and mores that they were.Life seems a lot like it was in "Babbitt", and at the end, the author does compare 1957 to the 20s.But an early statement is devastatingly accurate:"The difference between the 1950s and the 1990s is to a large extent the difference between a society in which market forces challenged traditional values and a society in which they have triumphed over them."

A provocative social history of the 1950s
Alan Ehrenhalt's premise is a provocative one: People in the 1950s were happy, and they were happy because they accepted authority. The book is a rebuttal to all those who portray the 1950s as the 'dark ages' of US history, and the author argues that even blacks were better off than popularly believed. Ehrenhalt takes us to three Chicago neighborhoods: the Southwest Side with its working-class Catholic population, the suburban community of Elmhurst, and the black ghetto of Bronzeville. In each, he shows that people in the 1950s were content with their lives, and in many ways were better off than they are now. Even Chicago's black ghetto had a multitude of black-owned businesses and black social organizations, which have since vanished, replaced by nothing but vacant lots and failed housing projects. This is a provocative work of social history that challenges our image of the 1950s, and in addition, it challenges our assumptions about the benefits of free choice and the 'evil' of obedience to authority.

A tour de force...
It is not often one encounters a scholarly work that is difficult to put down, but The Lost City is just that. I found this book to be immensely readable. Ehrenhalt's writing style is fluid and intriguing. By zeroing in on the individuals and communities that were archetypes of social conditions in the 1950s, the author is able to ground his argument solidly, while weaving an interesting dialogue of people and community.
If you have ever wondered about the "Fabulous Fifties" and what its communities were like, this is the book for you. Those longing for the security and morals of that decade may well be surprised by what was necessary of its citizens. The Lost City is a great read, and belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in society, community, and change. ... Read more

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Michael Lesy’s disturbingly satisfyingaccount ofChicago in the 1920s—the epicenter of murder inAmerica—could be fiction, but it’snot.“Things began as they usually did: Someone shot someone else.” So begins a chapterof this sharp, fearlesscollection from a master storyteller. Revisiting seventeen Chicago murder cases—including that of Belva andBeulah, two murderesses whosetrials inspired the musicalChicago—Michael Lesy captures anextraordinary moment in American history, bringing to life acity where newspapers scrambled to cover the latest mayhem. Just as Lesy’sbook Wisconsin DeathTrip subverted the accepted notion of theGay Nineties, so MurderCity exposes the tragedyofthe Jazz Age and the tortured individuals who may be the progenitors of ourmodern age. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

Chicago
There is nothing so wonderful as Chicago history. And especially the real story behind the musical Chicago.

Murder City
What a pitiful, needless book this is. The author merely rewrote newspaper articles about a few killers, seemingly choosing his subjects at random, and typed without flair or context. He even threw in a Wisconsin case for the hell of it, ignoring some fascinating Chicago murders. The best portions are the photographs and the Afterward. Much, much better accounts are Asbury's "Gem of the Prairie" and "The Chicago Crime Book."

Choppy writing style, difficult to follow certain stories
The author uses a very choppy writing style, calling things sentences only because they start with a capital letter and end in a period. While this technique of short phrases may be good to give a snapshot of the scene he is trying to set up, it makes it near impossible to follow the details of some of the more interesting and complicated stories he presents. Those stories read more like a grocery list of names with some attributes next to them than a historical narrative. Some of the stories I really enjoyed, but others were so poorly written that I regretted ever purchasing the book. It felt as if some of the stories were quickly slapped together from several newspaper sources, with nothing to tie the information together. I would only recommend this book if purchased at a huge discount.

Chicago Wiseguys
I think your average citizen was a lot safer when these guys ran things lousy politians got wacked and school kids were safeGood Read

A Middle-American Heart of Darkness
In this oddly disturbing book, Michael Lesy conjures a whirlpool of human venality and doubt.Odd because, after all, the basic lawlessness of 1920's Chicago is well documented, at least in broad outlines.The gangland murders, at least, have been given a gauzy aura of unreality by this point, due to too many sentimental movies and sanitized documentaries. To paraphrase a quote from an old time G-Man, outraged at the Hollywood glamorization of Bonnie & Clyde after the 1967 Warren Beatty film: "I saw what they did to people. They were just f--ing animals."In this book, through a lapidary accretion of detail, devoid of the usual "true crime" rhetorical flourishes, Lesy conjures up a howling American heart of darkness. Case studies of Chicago murders of the 1920's are laid out in staccato prose.Defendants and witnesses change their stories three, four, five, a dozen times.The same corpse lying on a slab in the morgue is positively identified as eight different missing persons by ostensibly close family and friends of each.Cops routinely keep suspects awake for 48 hours straight under relentless interrogation, and if that fails to elicit a confession, simply beat the hell out of them.A guy in Arizona falsely claims eyewitness knowledge of a murder, just to get free train fare back to Chicago. Drunken women shoot their husbands and boyfriends during alcoholic blackouts & are cut loose by sympathetic jurors. Juries routinely defy judges' instructions and follow their most primitive instincts in matters of life and death.One begins to wonder how anyone could have been reliably convicted of anything in that era, or perhaps in any era, before the advent of DNA testing.

All of this conjures up a fresh hell of human suffering.The banality of evil is almost palpable in these accounts.The effect is existential and harrowing.It's very difficult to contemplate the miserable, unadulterated reality and brutality of what these people have done, without couching it inside some sort of rhetorical scheme.Good guys/bad guys. Cops/ robbers.Abusive Men/Victimized women.All of that simplistic binary rubbish.Lesy takes that all away, or rather, relentlessly erodes it away with etched prose.Michael Lesy is of course a groundbreaking scholar of the visual culture of photography.His prose really is like a Weegee crime scene photograph, & captures, along with the vintage photographs he disinterred for this book, all of the miserable, sorrowful details of the exit of another human being from this world, right down to the brand of the bourbon bottle on the nightstand. Which is dead too.One is left quite disturbed by the book, but with the sense that this is extremely important work, a very painful kind of honesty. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (4)

Twice Told Tales (Entertaining, But Somewhat Inaccurate)
This book is fun to read, but it is not especially accurate.

The main author, Curt Johnson, admitted as much in the introduction. His verb of choice was "embroidered" when referring to those stories which were embellished or exaggerated to achieve greater effect. If an oft repeated saloon anecdote proved to be more amusing than a well documented account of a past event, the authors were perfectly happy to ditch the sworn testimony of eye witnesses and to repeat the punchlines of barroom comics who shaded the truth to better entertain their circle of listeners.

Not surprisingly, the text contains more than a few mistakes as a result of this approach. A few examples will suffice: Joe Aiello did reside in West Rogers Park and he was killed on Kolmar Avenue, but these were and are two entirely different addresses, some miles apart, not the same place. Similarly, Tim Murphy, the union racketeer, was a neighbor of Aiello's, but he was not murdered at his home on Kolmar. Many names are misspelled and dates and addresses are incorrect. From the field of sports, it should be noted that Clark Griffith managed the White Sox in 1901, not the team owner, Charles Comiskey. Comiskey formerly played for the St. Louis Browns of the American Association, not the National Federation, whatever that is.

This book reminded me of several earlier tomes by authors such as Herbert Asbury that repeated many of the same tall tales and yarns. "The Wicked City" contains a lengthy bibliography, but no footnotes whatsoever. This is never a good sign in a book that borrows so heavily from previously published works. Nevertheless, I was surprised to see that some other books have cited to "The Wicked City" as a serious reference despite its questionable status. If hearsay is repeated often enough it becomes compounded or double hearsay, not historical truth, no matter how popularly accepted the gossip is.

The photographs that accompanied the text looked as if they had been made on a photocopier that needed to have its toner cartridge replaced. That is a shame because the photos selected were otherwise quite interesting. Portions of the book are written in a choppy prose style, but it may have been the intention of the authors to emulate pulp fiction writers. Craig Sautter contributed two chapters on the rise of Theodore Dreiser and the origins of jazz music that differ significantly from Johnson's writing.

If I had the option of adding a half star to my rating, I would do so, but that is not permitted by the web site. I would have rated this book 3.5 rather than 3 if it were possible. One word of friendly warning: the concluding chapter is nothing more than an anticapitalist, antirepublican rant. The real villains in "The Wicked City" were Ronald W. Reagan and George H. W. Bush, not Al Capone and his gangsters.

Some readers will find "The Wicked City" somewhat enjoyable, provided that they take it with a dose of salts and dismiss its dubious historical accuracy. Many different topics treated in the book and some of the essentials are nonetheless correct. It is a paperback that could be enjoyed while riding a bus or relaxing at the beach.

Interesting Look at Chicago's past villians and others
This book gives readers a sense of Chicago's past by examining notorious villains and others that inhabited our city during its period of great expansion from 1880-1930.During that time Chicago grew on the strength of industry and immigration from 503,000 persons in 1880 to well over 3 million by 1930.These pages contain vignettes about gangsters like Johnny Torrio and Al Capone (both were originally from New York), crooked yet caring politicians like Bathhouse John Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna, and arrogant tycoons like George Pullman and Charles Yerkes.There's also some discussion of good guy artists like Louis Armstrong, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, etc., but the book is mostly devoted to the non-angelic. The vignettes are never too long, and always interesting, but the narrative seems a bit unorganized, and it helps if one is acquainted with the city's general history.Still, this is an interesting book.

Our city probably deserves its reputation for corruption, but one wonders why the like sins of other cities are so often ignored.Whatever the reasons, this narrative makes an interesting read.

An Unsung Nugget
I have read a number of books on Chicago during the time of Al Capone including three of his biographies, but this book is an overlooked gem.I accidentally came across it here at Amazon and decided to give it a try.All the colorful characters are here including those Lords of the Levee (Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink) and a number of gangsters during that time period you may have heard of and others that will likely be new to you.Yes, there are chapters of the McCormicks of Chicago, Jack Dempsey, the boxing champion of the time period, Louis Armstrong, and buffoon mayor, Big Bill Thompson.Some readers may feel they are being told more than they care to know about Chicago prior to and during the Capone era.I did not feel this way.I have often wondered what happened to a number of the lesser lights who were not as well known.The author provides us with this information. Also pointed out is that just saying a gangster was shot a number of times and killed doesn't do justice to the horror of what takes place.In addition to the tears of loved ones there is "no romance in mob warfare, only life's red blood, torn flesh, and death."Many of these mobsters died in their twenties or thirties.Sooner or later, usually sooner, most of them found their way to Mt. Carmel Cemetery.This book rates a solid five stars.I wish it was in hard cover.If you are interested in this time period I would suggest you get a copy and read it.You will not be disappointed.

a narrative of no flow
I'm the sure that the main draw to this book concerns the seedy, gangsterunderworld of Chicago.I don't know if I have enough patience to getthere; the narrative so far relates sound-bite stories of the founders,urban planners, and architects who first erected this city.It's extremelyinteresting material, but Johnson's flits over it all in barely readable,fragmented prose.Furthermore, as one unfamiliar with the city (especiallyas it was in the 1800s), his descriptions of the landscape (and the designof the buildings) leaves me still with a black box imagination of what thecity looks like.Pictures or illustrations would well suit theunderstanding of this book, which would lead to the (hopeful point of thestory) understanding of the city. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (3)

Great book about great people in a great city.
Tracy Baim has written an absolutely wonderful history about the LGBT history of the cit of Chicago. WONDERFUL !!!You won't be able to put it down.

Terrible Book on Gay Chicagoans
This 224 page book is the worse misrepresentation on GLBT Chicagoans to hit the market.It's full of male-bashing homophobic [...] and self-loathing dogs from Traci Baim and other so-called "lesbians" to homosexually abstinent creeps like alderman Tom Tunney and activists Otis Richardson and Max Smith.

A Beautiful Look at Chicago


Baim, Tracy. "Out and Proud in Chicago", Agate Surrey Books, 2008.

A Beautiful Look at Chicago

Amos Lassen

The gay community of Chicago has every reason to be proud with the publication of a new book which gives an overview of gay life in the windy city. I understand that it was produced to tie in with a television documentary of the same title. Isn't it good to see that our community is receiving the same type of coverage as other civil rights movements?
I have only good things to say about "Out and Proud in Chicago"--the photographs and the writing are both excellent and the book is not only for the people of Chicago, it is for all of us. What happened in Chicago has happened everywhere and although circumstances and locations may be different, the goal is the same--to give us the equal rights that we all deserve. The rights movement began simultaneously on both the east and west coasts and in the Midwest (Chicago) but for some reason, Middle America has been ignored in that reference. Chicago was greatly influenced by what was happening in New York and several northeastern gay rights leaders visited to help organize the community.
The book has many illustrations and it has been admirably researched using history, journalism and scholarship. We get a good look at not only the history but the culture of the city. Baim organized the book into chronological sections beginning with the Prairie Settlement and moving forward to the present time. She also provides a chapter about what to expect from the future. Baim brings us a history that once was hidden but now takes its place among other histories of the city. This is a wonderful addition to the canon of gay literature. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

One for the Sinners
The richness and diversity of Utah history tends to be obscured by Mormon history.So much energy is expended canonizing Utah's saints that few resources remain for celebrating and preserving the capricious, ironic, and improvisatory.("[In Utah] people talk only of the Prophet, hogs, and Fords," cracked Bernard DeVoto in 1926.)

In New York City, for example, A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell chronicled gorgeous demotic street scenes for the ages.But as far as I know, nothing comparable in Utah literature ever emerged.The stories a Liebling or Mitchell might have dug up had they toured Utah, however, are at least hinted at in Jeffrey Nichols's study of prostitution in Salt Lake City (and Ogden) during the years just before and after statehood (1896).(In fact, as Nichols tells us, a very young Harold Ross covered the red-light district for the Salt Lake Tribune two decades before founding The New Yorker.)

Despite the unique religious and moral strictures in Utah's criminal code, prostitution as an industry had no better or worse luck surviving in Salt Lake than elsewhere.If other cities experimented with regulation but then gravitated toward total suppression, Nichols shows that Utah moved in lockstep with the rest of the country.A few hilarious bits bubble up through the book's erudition.One sumptuous brothel flourished for a time inside the Brigham Young Trust Company building.Later, a high-profile madam included the governing councils of the Mormon Church among the Utah dignitaries to whom she sent engraved invitations to the opening of her Palace bordello.

For Utah history buffs, Nichols's bibliography and notes alone are worth the price of the book. ... Read more

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Profiling the 1950s in America as a period of community during which people knew clear expectations and accepted their limits, a cultural history attributes the loss of this community to the baby-boomer generation's 1960s rejection of authority. ... Read more

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This book is an examination of the image of Chicago in American popular culture between the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and Chicago's 1968 Democratic National Convention. ... Read more

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This is the first comprehensive treatment of the complex phenomenon of African-American mayors in America's major urban centers. Offering a diverse portrait of leadership, conflict, and almost insurmountable obstacles, this volume assesses the political alliances that brought black mayors to office as well as the accomplishments and challenges that marked their careers. Facing the intractable problems of decaying inner cities, white flight, a dwindling tax base, violent crime, and diminishing federal support for social programs, many African-American mayors also encountered hostility from their own parties, city councils, and police departments. Mayors profiled include Carl B. Stokes (Cleveland), Richard G. Hatcher (Gary), 'Dutch' Morial (New Orleans), Harold Washington (Chicago), Tom Bradley (Los Angeles), Marion Barry (Washington, D.C.), David Dinkins (New York City), Coleman Young (Detroit), and a succession of black mayors in Atlanta (Maynard Jackson, Andrew Young, and Bill Campbell). David R. Colburn is the author of "Southern Businessmen and Desegregation", "Racial Change and Community Crisis" and other books. Jeffrey S.Adler is the author of "Yankee Merchants and the Making of the West". ... Read more

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"African Americans in the Furniture City" is unique not only in terms of its subject, but also for its framing of the African American struggle for survival, civil rights, and community inside a discussion of the larger white community. Examining the African-American community of Grand Rapids, Michigan between 1850 and 1954, Randal Maurice Jelks uncovers the ways in which its members faced urbanization, responded to structural racism, developed in terms of occupations, and shaped their communal identities. Focusing on the intersection of African Americans' nineteenth-century cultural values and the changing social and political conditions in the first half of the twentieth century, Jelks pays particularly close attention to the religious community's influence during their struggle toward a respectable social identity and fair treatment under the law. He explores how these competing values defined the community's politics as it struggled to expand its freedoms and change its status as a subjugated racial minority. ... Read more

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At the close of World War II, Americans became increasingly concerned about the problem of housing for returning veterans, relocated defense workers, and their families. Designs such as the garden city that dated from the turn of the twentieth century or earlier were prominent once again, as planners saw a renewed need for ready-made communities. One such community--among the first and, perhaps, most representative -- was Park Forest, Illinois, a privately built and publicly managed town twenty-six miles south of Chicago.

In this book, Gregory Randall presents the history of the planning, design, construction, and growth of Park Forest. He shows how planners -- who dubbed the new community a "GI town" -- drew on lessons learned from English garden cities and New Deal greenbelt towns to cope with America's emerging peacetime housing crisis. He also shows how this new town changed community planning throughout the United States, including its effects on community development up to the present.

Customer Reviews (2)

They should have stopped the press before it ran out of ink.
This is a terrific history, especially for someone like me who grew up in Park Forest and has personal familiarity with the village and its people. Unfortunately, the book they sent to me must have been the last one off the press. The ink on the even-numbered pages was barely visible. So I read the odd-numbered pages and got half the story. As Mom always said: "Half a loaf is better than none."

Park Forest, Illinois:An American Original
This is a planner's history of this unique American village, located about thirty miles South of Chicago.Gregory Randall has the advantage of growing up in Park Forest, which gives him some insight into the communitythat an outside observer might miss.He also has the training andexperience as an urban planner to understand and appreciate thecomplexities of creating a new town.

Randall places Park Forest in thecontex of planned communities in England and the United States.Hisdiscussion of Riverside, Illinois, is good; but he ignores Pullman,Illinois, and Marktown, Indiana, as earlier planned communities in theChicago area.His treatment of Harvey, Illinois, includes the minor errorof listing the Chicago lumberman, Turlington W. Harvey, as an evangelist,although he was associated with the evangelist, Dwight Moody.

He alsodoes not deal with the demogragrahic changes that been pronounced on theSouth Side of Chicago and the South Suburbs.This racial and ethicmovement has affected the developments that the planners did notanticipate.Perhaps, this is beyond the scope Randall's book, and deservesa monograph of its own.

As a resident of Park Forest for twenty-six yearsI learned much about the origins and developmentof my town.I wasespecially interested in the how the lack of cooperation from the IllinoisCentral Railroad, forced the planners to drop their first chice for thelocation of the Park Forest Plaza.Thus, many of Park Forest's problemswith a declining downtown area can be understood.I recommend this book toall who have an interest in the post-World War II period, and especially toall those who live Chicago area. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from University Business, published by Professional Media Group LLC on January 1, 2010. The length of the article is 353 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Soul schools in the windy city: 21st century change agents.(FUTURE SHOCK)(Chicago, Illinois)
Author: James Martin
Publication: University Business (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 2010
Publisher: Professional Media Group LLC
Volume: 13Issue: 1Page: 19(1)

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

GREAT PRICE!
Best way to buy college textbooks! This vendors product was right on the money and I can't believe I haven't been buying my books like this all along.

Hard read
Ok, this was assigned reading for a class, one of a dozen books to read for a history class. Of that dozen, this was the most difficult boring read in the bunch.The subject is very interetsing, the writing was very poor. I mentioned the poor writing to the professor who said not everyone wrote like Barbara T.
How true.Unfortunately, I could not find another book on the subject that was embracing of the area of woman's life in the period between the end of the revolution and the begining of the civil war.
I found no mention of the chatel placement of women in divorce or the legal rights of women, especially as toward their ownership of property.I think this was a big lack, as it explained many of the problems the author wrote about in the book.

Not reccomended for use as a text in classes.Reccomended for reading in bed.

Working-class women upsetting notions of republicanism in early U.S. history
(Edit: I meant to rate this book four stars, but was unable to change my rating after the fact...fie on you, Amazon!)

An important exploration of working-class women's positions in the urban landscape of the nineteenth century, in particular as it related to revolutionary and post-revolutionary ideals of republicanism. Stansell seeks to correct earlier histories, which cast female workers as "either feminine versions of working-class men or working-class versions of middle-class women," as victims who occasionally and inexplicably revolted, but were mostly passive.

Initially, the American ideology of republicanism was built upon independence; those that were dependent -- including women -- could thus not be complete citizens. Yet popular republicanism did create an imagery of motherhood, incorporating virtuous mothers educating their sons in republican values. Ultimately this imagery did not destabilize the patriarchy, but even at its prime it competed directly with working-class female imagery. While upper-class women were moral guardians, working women -- "refusing" to conform to bourgeois female notions of virtue -- were defeminized, and contributed directly to the creation of the "tenement classes," a source of both moral and physical contagion.

Laboring women had little distinction between the public and private spheres, unlike either laboring men or bourgeois women. "Their domestic lives spread out to the hallways of their tenements, to adjoining apartments and to the streets below. Household work involved them constantly with the milieu outside their own four walls ... It was in the urban neighborhoods, not the home, that the identity of working-class wives and mothers was rooted."

While a useful social history of white women and the class tensions that existed in New York, Stansell silences religious and ethnic tensions (black women are almost nonexistent in her book) and uses New York as an emblem of "industrialization" in a traditionally linear theory of progression toward "modernity." Nonetheless, an important work in U.S. urban history.

A comprehensive but flawed portrayal of antebellum New York City
Written during a time of rapid expansion in the study of women's history, "City of Women" maintains a focus on women that is both rewarding and problematic.While her portryal gives voice to a group of women who before had none, it also creates a dichotomy that labels virtually every man mentioned in her book as pernicious and/or sinister, and her women as the constant victims of their hegemony and terror.As a result, we are left with an incomplete portrait of New York working-class society.Proto-feminists are rewarded while those women who cause no problems are largely ignored.It is here that Stansell particularly differs from Lauren Thatcher Ulrich, who championed the cause of the ordinary Puritan woman in "Good Wives."Stansell's conflict theory leads the reader with no comprehension of ordinary interaction between the sexes; only rape, murder, and other heinous crimes.In the end, neither her women or her men are redeemed.

Nonetheless "City of Women" is a must-read for gender historians, and should be read carefully, with its flaws taken into account and understood partly as product of the politics of its time.

A History of Survival
During the early part of the nineteenth century, women began to experience their first taste of autonomy.Although women were finding a role in the American workplace and society there were not many options for them.As part of the struggle to escape poverty in New York City, prostitution became an increasingly viable choice for girls with out other alternatives. Historian Christine Stansell states, "It was both an economic and a social option, a means of self-support and a way to bargain with men in a situation where a living wage was hard to come by, and holding one's own in heterosexual relations was difficult." This book deals with women in the factories as well as the working girls. Easy to read and very informative. ... Read more

Product Description
The fateful kick of Mrs. O'Leary's cow, the wild flight before the flames, the astonishingly quick rebuilding--these are the well-known stories of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. But as much as Chicago's recovery from disaster was a remarkable civic achievement, the Great Fire is also the story of a city's people divided and at odds. This is the story that Karen Sawislak tells so revealingly in this book.

In a detailed account, drawn on memoirs, private correspondences, and other documents, Sawislak chronicles years of widespread, sometimes bitter, social and political conflict in the fire's wake, from fights over relief soup kitchens to cries against profiteering and marches on city hall by workers burned out of their homes. She shows how through the years of rebuilding the people of Chicago struggled to define civic order--and the role that "good citizens" would play within it. As they rebuilt, she writes, Chicagoans confronted hard questions about charity and social welfare, work and labor relations, morality, and the limits of state power. Their debates in turn exposed the array of values and interests that different class, ethnic, and religious groups brought to these public discussions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Excellent
This is the premier book for information regarding the recovery of the Great Chicago Fire.An absolute must read for anyone seriously studying Chicago history or, like me, an emergency management student.

Exactly what I was looking for.
This is exactly what I was looking for.My great great grandparents lived in Chicago during the great fire.I always wondered what my family had experienced during the years they were in Chicago and why they decided to leave for Nebraska.I believe I found my answers. ... Read more

Product Description
Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

William James's review
Jane Adams is the female lead of Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club.Here is a review of her book by one of it's male leads, William James, from a letter to her:

I have just read your Spirit of Youth, and think it "simply great."Hard not to cry at certain pages!The fact is, Madam, that you are not like the rest of us, who SEEK the truth and TRY to express it.You INHABIT reality; and when you open your mouth truth can't help being uttered.I think that this book will have a great and vital influence. ... Read more