In the early twentieth century, an exuberant brand of gifted men and women moved to New York City, not to get rich but to participate in a cultural revolution. For them, the city's immigrant neighborhoods--home to art, poetry, cafes, and cabarets in the European tradition--provided a place where the fancies and forms of a new America could be tested. Some called themselves Bohemians, some members of the avant-garde, but all took pleasure in the exotic, new, and forbidden.

In "American Moderns," Christine Stansell tells the story of the most famous of these neighborhoods, Greenwich Village, which--thanks to cultural icons such as Eugene O'Neill, Isadora Duncan, and Emma Goldman--became a symbol of social and intellectual freedom. Stansell eloquently explains how the mixing of old and new worlds, politics and art, and radicalism and commerce so characteristic of New York shaped the modern American urban scene. "American Moderns" is both an examination and a celebration of a way of life that's been nearly forgotten.

In this definitive volume, respected historian Christine Stansell tells the story of one of the great democratic movements of our times. She paints richly detailed portraits of well-known leaders--Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Betty Friedan--but others, too, appear in a new light, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Toni Morrison. Accounting for the failures of feminism as well as the successes, Stansell notes the emergence in the early 1900s of the dashing"New Woman"; the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote; the post-World War II collapseof suburban neo-Victorianism; the radical feminism of the 1960s; and the fight for women's rights in developing countries in the era of international feminist movements. A soaring work, "The Feminist Promise "is bound to become an authoritative source on this essential subject for decades to come.

At the time of its original publication, Working-Class America represented the new labor history par excellence. A roster of noteworthy scholars in the field contribute original essays written during a pivotal time in the nation's history and within the discipline. Moving beyond historical-sociological analyses, the authors take readers inside the lives of the real men and women behind the statistics. The result is a classic collection focused on the human dimensions of the field, one valuable not only as a resource for historiography but as a snapshot of workers and their concerns in the 1980s.