For the two-semester U.S. history survey course. Offers students insight into how diverse communities and different regions have shaped America's past. Out of Many reveals the ethnic, geographical and economic diversity of the United States by examining the individual, the community and the state and placing a special focus on the country's regions, particularly the West. Each chapter helps students understand the textured and varied history that has produced the increasing complexity of America.

For the two-semester U.S. history survey course. Offers students insight into how diverse communities and different regions have shaped America's past. Out of Many reveals the ethnic, geographical and economic diversity of the United States by examining the individual, the community and the state and placing a special focus on the country's regions, particularly the West. Each chapter helps students understand the textured and varied history that has produced the increasing complexity of America.

For the two-semester U.S. history survey course. Offers students insight into how diverse communities and different regions have shaped America's past. Out of Many reveals the ethnic, geographical and economic diversity of the United States by examining the individual, the community and the state and placing a special focus on the country's regions, particularly the West. Each chapter helps students understand the textured and varied history that has produced the increasing complexity of America.

The revised and updated third edition of The Making of Urban America includes seven new articles and a richly detailed historiographical essay that discusses the vast urban history literature added to the canon since the publication of the second edition. The authors' extensively revised introductions and the fifteen reprinted articles trace urban development from the preindustrial city to the twentieth-century city. With emphasis on the social, economic, political, commercial, and cultural aspects of urban history, these essays illustrate the growth and change that created modern-day urban life. Dynamic topics such as technology, immigration and ethnicity, suburbanization, sunbelt cities, urban political history, and planning and housing are examined. The Making of Urban America is the only reader available that covers all of U.S. urban history and that also includes the most recent interpretive scholarship on the subject.

Before publishing his pioneering book "How the Other Half Lives"--a photojournalistic investigation into the poverty of New York's tenement houses, home to three quarters of the city's population--Jacob Riis (1849-1914) spent his first years in the United States as an immigrant and itinerant laborer, barely surviving on his carpentry skills until he landed a job as a muckraking reporter. These early experiences provided Riis with an understanding of what it was like to be poor in the immigrant communities that populated New York's slums, and it was this empathy that would shine through in his iconic photos.
With "Rediscovering Jacob Riis," art historian Bonnie Yochelson and historian Daniel Czitrom place Jacob Riis's images in historical context even as they expose a clear sightline to the present. In the first half of their book, Czitrom explores Riis's reporting and activism within the gritty specifics of Gilded Age New York: its new immigrants, its political machines, its fiercely competitive journalism, its evangelical reformers, and its labor movement. In delving into Riis's intellectual education and the lasting impact of "How the Other Half Lives," Czitrom shows that though Riis argued for charity, not sociopolitical justice, the empathy that drove his work continues to inspire urban reformers today.
In the second half of the book, Yochelson describes for the first time Riis's photographic practice: his initial reliance on amateur photographers to take the photographs he needed, his own use of the camera, and then his collecting of photographs by professionals, who by 1900 were documenting social reform efforts for government agencies and charities. She argues that while Riis is rightly considered a revolutionary in the history of photography, he was not a photographic artist. Instead, Riis was a writer and lecturer who first harnessed the power of photography to affect social change.
As staggering inequality continues to be an urgent political topic, this book, illustrated with nearly seventy of Riis's photographs, will serve as a stunning reminder of what has changed, and what has not.

On a Sunday morning in early 1892, Reverend Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst ascended to his pulpit at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church in New York and delivered one of the most explosive sermons in the city's history. Municipal life, he charged, was morally corrupt. Vice was rampant. And the city's police force and its Tammany Hall politicians were"a lying, perjured, rum-soaked, and libidinous lot." Denounced by city and police officials as a self-righteous "blatherskite," Parkhurst resolved to prove his case. The bespectacled minister descended his pulpit and in disguise visited gin joints and brothels, taking notes and gathering evidence. Two years later, his findings forced the New York State Senate to investigate the New York Police Department. The Lexow Committee heard testimony from nearly 700 witnesses, who revealed in shocking-and headline-dominating-detail just how deeply the NYPD was involved in, and benefited from, the vice economy. Parkhurst's campaign had kick-started the Progressive Movement. New York Exposed offers a narrative history of the first major crusade to clean up Gotham. Daniel Czitrom does full justice to this spellbinding story by telling it within the larger contexts of national politics, poverty, patronage, vote fraud and vote suppression, and police violence. The effort to root out corrupt cops and crooked politicians morphed into something much more profound: a public reckoning over what New York-and the American city-had become since the Civil War. Animated by as vivid a cast as New York has ever produced, the book's key characters include Police Superintendent Thomas Byrnes and Inspector Alexander "Clubber" Williams, the nation's most famous cops, as well as anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman, the zealous prosecutor John W. Goff, and an array of politicos, immigrant leaders, labor bosses, prostitutes, show-business entrepreneurs, counterfeiters, and reformers and muckrakers determined to change business as usual. New York Exposed offers an unforgettable portrait of a city in a truly transformative moment.

In an incendiary 1892 sermon given at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, the Rev. Charles Parkhurst declared New York's municipal life to be deplorable and corrupt, controlled by "polluted harpies feeding day and night on its quivering vitals." While city officials denounced him as a "blatherskite" and a "cowardly defamer," Parkhurst set about gathering a slew of evidence to present in a later series of sermons that captivated city residents and the press alike. Parkhurst believed that only a Christian revival, combined with a new, non-partisan approach to governing, could save New York. Disguised as an out of towner, he toured New York's underworld, gathering evidence which he presented in sermons. Two years later, his crusade led the state senate to found the Lexow Committee, whose comprehensive investigation (including testimonies from nearly 700 witnesses) revealed the dark underside of New York's vice economy and the police force's complicity in it, effectively launching the Progressive movement. Animated by a colorful cast of characters ranging from the bosses of Tammany Hall to prostitutes and counterfeiters, Daniel Czitrom offers a vivid account of a formative time when muckraking journalism and urban reform were just beginning to alter the American social and political landscape. As Czitrom reveals, the relationship between New York politics and the NYPD affected not only the life of the city, but of the nation as a whole.