City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (Popular Cultures, Everyday Lives) [Paperback]

David Henkin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0231107455 | ISBN-13: 978-0231107457 | Publication Date: December 16, 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A strikingly original account of a new kind of literacy in mid-nineteenth century New York City.

(Konstantin Dierks Journal of the Early Republic )

Review

City Reading is great fun to read, and it is full of fresh and insightful observations on how New Yorkers 'read' their city through a remarkable variety of public texts -- outdoor signs, billboards and handbills, newspapers, and currency -- in the first half of the nineteenth century.

(Elizabeth Blackmar, author of Manhattan for Rent Fall 07)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press (December 16, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231107455
• ISBN-13: 978-0231107457
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #282,428 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #61 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Native American

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