The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. By Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 278 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 978-0-226-11233-6. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 978-0-226-11234-3.)

Abstract

Mindful through my own work of the puffery antebellum reviewers unleashed upon their often unsuspecting readers, I have become reticent to heap praise upon even today's deserving books without leavening it with some criticism. The first exception in my reviewing career is a book that I believe should be on the shelf of every antebellum sociocultural historian: The Flash Press, by a power trio of nineteenth-century American public sexuality scholars, Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. Each has previously written cutting-edge books featuring masterful in-depth research in primary sources on sexual topics so controversial in their own time and so censorship-worthy after the 1873 federal Comstock Law, that it is a miracle that any documentation has survived. Sifting through the evidentiary haystack for proverbial needles, the three authors (coming from different directions—a cultural history of a prostitute's high-profile murder [Cohen], an urban microhistory of prostitution [Gilfoyle], and an analysis of sexual knowledge [Horowitz])—converged on a remarkable find, the flash press that flourished in New York City from roughly late 1841 through early 1843. In the book's introduction, the authors fascinatingly recount their individual discovery and uses of these newspapers dedicated to limning the demimonde, alternately by celebrating or critiquing it, at times in the same paragraph. Some incomplete runs of these scandalous sheets have come down to us through a fortuitous if ironic turn: they were collected by a New York district attorney as evidence for possible prosecutions against their publishers (p. 227n7). Other issues apparently wended their way through hands of sports journalists, whose main interest seems to have been the coverage of past sporting events (pp. 5–6). Those different preservation streams resulted in 104 issues, representing about three quarters of what is thought to have been printed (p. 5), now housed at the American Antiquarian Society.