City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New YorkColumbia University Press, 1998 - 242 Seiten Cultural historian David Henkin explores the influential but little-noticed role played by reading in New York City's public life between 1825 and 1865. From the opening of the Erie Canal to the end of the Civil War, New York became a metropolis, and demographic, economic, and physical changes erased the old markers of continuity and order. As New York became a crowded city of strangers, everyday encounters with impersonal signs, papers, and bank notes altered people's perceptions of connectedness to the new world they lived in. The 'ubiquitous urban texts'--from newspapers to paper money, from street signs to handbills--became both indispensable urban guides and apt symbols for a new kind of public life that emerged first in New York. City Reading focuses on four principal categories of public reading: street signs and store signs; handbills and trade cards; newspapers; and paper money. Drawing on a wealth of visual sources and written texts that document the changing cityscape--including novels, diaries, newspapers, municipal guides, and government records--Henkin shows that public acts of reading (to a much greater extent than private, solitary reading) determined how New Yorkers of all backgrounds came to define themselves and their urban community. |
Inhalt
Public Reading Public Space I | 1 |
Bills Boards and Banners | 69 |
The Rise of the Daily Paper | 101 |
The Case of Paper Money | 137 |
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS | 231 |
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City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York David M. Henkin Eingeschränkte Leseprobe - 1998 |
Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen
advertising American anonymous antebellum New York appeared authority banknotes Barnum became Bennett bills Broadway buildings Cartman Central Park century changes circulation city reading city's cityscape Civil claims columns commercial signs communication counterfeit detectors daily newspaper daily paper decades Diary discourse economic everyday example Habermas handbills Herald historians identity impact impersonal Jacksonian James Gordon Bennett John journals Letters literacy lithograph Manhattan mass Metropolis metropolitan press modern New-York Historical Society newsboy nineteenth nineteenth-century numbers Old New York P. T. Barnum paper currency paper money parade banners particular penny press Philip Hone political popular population posters print culture proliferation promiscuous public space public sphere readers readership relationship residents role Sean Wilentz sign system social store signs story strangers street names street signs Tailer tion trade cards University Press urban public urban texts verbal visitor visual writing and print written word York City York's Yorkers