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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Emergency services > Fire services
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Cause for Alarm - The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Hardcover)
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Cause for Alarm - The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Hardcover)
Series: Princeton Legacy Library
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Though central to the social, political, and cultural life of the
nineteenth-century city, the urban volunteer fire department has
nevertheless been largely ignored by historians. Redressing this
neglect, Amy Greenberg reveals the meaning of this central
institution by comparing the fire departments of Baltimore, St.
Louis, and San Francisco from the late eighteenth to the
mid-nineteenth century. Volunteer fire companies protected highly
flammable cities from fire and provided many men with friendship,
brotherhood, and a way to prove their civic virtue. While other
scholars have claimed that fire companies were primarily working
class, Greenberg shows that they were actually mixed social groups:
merchants and working men, immigrants and native-born--all found a
common identity as firemen. Cause for Alarm presents a new vision
of urban culture, one defined not by class but by gender. Volunteer
firefighting united men in a shared masculine celebration of
strength and bravery, skill and appearance. In an otherwise
alienating environment, fire companies provided men from all walks
of life with status, community, and an outlet for competition,
which sometimes even led to elaborate brawls. While this culture
was fully respected in the early nineteenth century, changing
social norms eventually demonized the firemen's vision of
masculinity. Greenberg assesses the legitimacy of accusations of
violence and political corruption against the firemen in each city,
and places the municipalization of firefighting in the context of
urban social change, new ideals of citizenship, the rapid spread of
fire insurance, and new firefighting technologies. Originally
published in 1998. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest
print-on-demand technology to again make available previously
out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton
University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of
these important books while presenting them in durable paperback
and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is
to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in
the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press
since its founding in 1905.
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