Draft Riots Research Articles

Angels of mercy: white women and the history of New York's Colored Orphan Asylum

William Seraile uncovers the history of the colored orphan asylum, founded in New York City in 1836 as the nation's first orphanage for African American children. It is a remarkable institution that is still in the forefront aiding children. Although no longer an orphanage, in its current incarnation as Harlem-Dowling West Side Center for Children and Family Services it maintains the principles of the women who organized it nearly 200 years ago. The agency weathered three wars, two major financial panics, a devastating fire during the 1863 Draft Riots, several epidemics, waves of racial prejudice, and severe financial difficulties to care for orphaned, neglected, and delinquent children. Eventually financial support would come from some of New York's finest families, including the Jays, Murrays, Roosevelts, Macys, and Astors.While the white female managers and their male advisers were dedicated to uplifting these black children, the evangelical, mainly Quaker founding managers also exhibited the extreme paternalistic views endemic at the time, accepting the advice or support of the African American community only grudgingly. It was frank criticism in 1913 from W. E. B. Du Bois that highlighted the conflict between the orphanage and the community it served, and it wasn't until 1939 that it hired the first black trustee. More than 15,000 children were raised in the orphanage, and throughout its history letters and visits have revealed that hundreds if not thousands of old boys and girlslooked back with admiration and respect at the home that nurtured them throughout their formative years. Weaving together African American history with a unique history of New York City, this is not only a painstaking study of a previously unsung institution of black history but a unique window onto complex racial dynamics during a period when many failed to recognize equality among all citizens as a worthy purpose.

Letter to the Editor

To the Editor: Potentially misleading statements mar Michael J. Pfeifer's illuminating article, “The Northern United States and the Genesis of Racial Lynching: The Lynching of African Americans in the Civil War Era”: “At least 120 persons died in the New York City draft riots; Irish rioters burned the corpse of an African American that they had hanged and sexually mutilated other black victims” (JAH, Dec. 2010, p. 622n2). The quotation implies that most if not all riot victims were black. However, the vast majority of those killed were white, slaughtered by the state: the U.S. Army, state militia, and New York Police Department. Nevertheless, undergraduates often learn that only or primarily African Americans died. Pfeifer cites Paul Gilje, Rioting in America (1996), pages 92–93, and Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery (2003), pages 279–88, as his sources. Gilje notes that the mob attacked and sometimes killed police,...

Black Gotham: a family history of African Americans in nineteenth-century New York City

Part detective tale, part social and cultural narrative, Black Gotham is Carla Peterson's riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her ancestors. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbors, and business associates, she illuminates the greater history of African-American elites in York City. Black Gotham challenges many of the accepted truths about African-American history, including the assumption that the phrase nineteenth-century black means enslaved people, that New York state before the Civil refers to a place of freedom, and that a black elite did not exist until the twentieth century. Beginning her story in the 1820s, Peterson focuses on the pupils of the Mulberry Street School, the graduates of which went on to become eminent African-American leaders. She traces their political activities as well as their many achievements in trade, business, and the professions against the backdrop of the expansion of scientific racism, the trauma of the Civil War draft riots, and the rise of Jim Crow. Told in a vivid, fast-paced style, Black Gotham is an important account of the rarely acknowledged achievements of African Americans and brings to the forefront a vital yet forgotten part of American history and culture.

The Taste of Class

MLA 2011 | Los Angeles, California Melville and the Syntax of Class Chair: Ivy G. Wilson, Northwestern University In settings as various as whaling ships and Wall Street offices, pastoral meadows and English leisure clubs, Melville’s writings are preoccupied with class formations and with contradictions of decadence and poverty, excess and paucity. While much of the criticism on Melville and class has approached the topic through psychoanalysis to limn readings about his own personal anxieties in works such as Pierre or “Bartleby,” this panel sought to underscore what a historical materialist approach to Melville’s work can reveal about his social world. Glenn Hendler argued that, in “The House-Top,” Melville forced a recognition of the ways in which the white participants of the New York Draft Riots coalesced as a contingent but nonetheless specific class formation. Calling for a more sustained critical engagement with Melville’s transnationalism and tracing his early use of the word “cholo,” Rodrigo Lazo showed how Melville invoked South America and the South American to make class distinctions legible to his readers. Kyla Tompkins analyzed Melville’s preoccupation with taste in “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” as a metaphor for the organization of social differentiation and inequity. Feeling Like a State Glenn Hendler Fordham University Melville’s “The House-Top,” a lyric poem about the 1863 New York City Draft Riots published in Battle-Pieces, remains exceptional not simply as an example of Melville’s genius for compressing the epichistorical into the space of a lyric but also for how it compels the reader to come to terms with the effects and affects of the war’s various permutations. Acknowledging Melville’s engagement with affect, we become aware that the c © 2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 124 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S

Melville and the Syntax of Class

MLA 2011 | Los Angeles, California Melville and the Syntax of Class Chair: Ivy G. Wilson, Northwestern University In settings as various as whaling ships and Wall Street offices, pastoral meadows and English leisure clubs, Melville’s writings are preoccupied with class formations and with contradictions of decadence and poverty, excess and paucity. While much of the criticism on Melville and class has approached the topic through psychoanalysis to limn readings about his own personal anxieties in works such as Pierre or “Bartleby,” this panel sought to underscore what a historical materialist approach to Melville’s work can reveal about his social world. Glenn Hendler argued that, in “The House-Top,” Melville forced a recognition of the ways in which the white participants of the New York Draft Riots coalesced as a contingent but nonetheless specific class formation. Calling for a more sustained critical engagement with Melville’s transnationalism and tracing his early use of the word “cholo,” Rodrigo Lazo showed how Melville invoked South America and the South American to make class distinctions legible to his readers. Kyla Tompkins analyzed Melville’s preoccupation with taste in “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” as a metaphor for the organization of social differentiation and inequity. Feeling Like a State Glenn Hendler Fordham University Melville’s “The House-Top,” a lyric poem about the 1863 New York City Draft Riots published in Battle-Pieces, remains exceptional not simply as an example of Melville’s genius for compressing the epichistorical into the space of a lyric but also for how it compels the reader to come to terms with the effects and affects of the war’s various permutations. Acknowledging Melville’s engagement with affect, we become aware that the c © 2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 124 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S

The public and its possibilities: triumphs and tragedies in the American city

The public and its possibilities: triumphs and tragedies in the American city

Measures for a "Speedy Conclusion": A Reexamination of Conscription and Civil War Federalism

Measures for a "Speedy Conclusion":A Reexamination of Conscription and Civil War Federalism Rachel A. Shelden (bio) The traditional story of northern conscription during the Civil War is a familiar one to scholars and casual readers alike. In this narrative, the states, and particularly governors, maintained control of military recruitment early in the war. Significant Republican losses in both governors' mansions and state legislatures in the November 1862 elections, however, made Republican leaders in Washington wary of leaving the responsibility of raising armies to their political opponents.1 These federal politicians had already begun to implement legislation that strengthened the federal government at the expense of the states in the areas of banking and property rights.2 The 37th [End Page 469] Congress extended these nationalizing tendencies to the military arena through a national conscription act—officially called the Enrollment Act of March 1863.3 By the summer of 1863, the federal government imposed the draft on weakened state and local governments without their help or consent. Yet, the northern public met Congress's conscription act with widespread disapproval, culminating in the weeklong New York City draft riots of July 1863. In effect, the riots symbolized a last public stand against a centralized government.4 After Appomattox, as a result of conscription and other wartime policies, the United States finally became a modern, centralized country.5 This story is now outdated. A reexamination of the path toward national conscription on the national and state levels demonstrates that scholars have [End Page 470] tended to overstate the extent to which the federal government exerted its will over allegedly feeble state governments. Ultimately, not only was the draft enacted with the general compliance of the states, the policy was often proposed, encouraged, and sanctioned by state and local leaders. Using New York as a window into the Civil War relationship between state and national governments, this essay will demonstrate that Lincoln and Congress pursued a conscription policy that state and local representatives had long been considering and promoting.6 To these New York officials, a rigorous prosecution of the war in 1862 and 1863 demanded a draft, whether it should originate from state governments or from the U.S. Congress. This new understanding of conscription contributes to what appears to be a significant paradigm shift in the study of federalism and the Civil War era. While older histories have argued that the war provided the federal government with an opportunity to permanently seize power from the states, recent work on party politics, confiscation, and recruitment by scholars such as Mark Neely, Adam I. P. Smith, Silvana Siddali, and William Blair illustrate a more nuanced relationship among local, state, and federal officials as well as the northern public.7 As these historians show, the federal government [End Page 471] relied on cooperation, conversation, and even advice from party members closer to the ground. A new analysis of northern conscription will further emphasize the complex nature of Civil War federalism. This essay revises the traditional story of Civil War conscription in three ways. First, while most scholars have focused either on federal policymaking or the state response, I examine both levels of government and how they interact.8 The number of letters, directed editorials, telegrams, and visits [End Page 472] among federal, state, and local officials illustrates just how important vertical political relationships were to determining war policy and conscription in particular. These state and local leaders were often able to influence or alter legislation and executive department orders.9 Some even provided advice that would prove essential to Union strategy.10 Furthermore, in the tense atmosphere of Civil War politics, state and local officials often looked to the federal government to propose and enforce somewhat unpopular and politically dangerous measures, like conscription. The relationship between state and federal officials is more complex in the context of divided government. After the 1862 elections, many states found themselves with one branch controlled by Democrats and the other in the hands of Republicans. In the case of New York, Democrat Horatio Seymour—the new governor in the spring of 1863—strongly opposed conscription and has often been historians' focus in portraying a reluctant or resistant state...

Habits of whiteness: a pragmatist reconstruction

Introduction: AAQue Haces Gringuito?! Part 1. History 1. Bacon's Rebellion and the Advent of Whiteness 2. The Draft Riots of 1863 and the Defense of White Privilege Part 2. Pragmatist Tools 3. John Dewey and Inquiry 4. Race as Deweyan Habit 5. Du Bois and the Gift of Race 6. Du Bois' Critique of Whiteness Part 3. Contemporary Problems and Debates 7. Whiteness in Post-Civil Rights America 8. Contemporary Debates on Whiteness Part 4. Reconstructing Whiteness 9. Habits of Whiteness 10. Whiteness Reconstructed Conclusion: Gifts Beyond the Pale Notes Bibliography Index

Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North

If Civil War battlefields saw vast carnage, Northern home-front was itself far from tranquil. Fierce political debates set communities on edge, spurred secret plots against Union, and triggered widespread violence, such as New York City draft riots. And at heart of all this turmoil stood Northern anti-war Democrats, nicknamed Copperheads. Now, Jennifer L. Weber offers first full-length portrait of this powerful faction to appear in almost half a century. Weber reveals how Copperheads came perilously close to defeating Lincoln and ending war in South's favor. Indeed, by summer of 1864, they had grown so strong that Lincoln himself thought his defeat was exceedingly likely. Passionate defenders of civil liberties and states' rights--and often virulent racists--the Copperheads deplored Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, his liberal interpretation of Constitution, and, most vehemently, his moves toward emancipation. Weber reveals how battle over these issues grew so heated, particularly in Midwest, that Northerners feared their neighbors would destroy their livestock, burn their homes, even kill them. Indeed, some Copperheads went so far as to conspire with Confederate forces and plan armed insurrections, including an attempt to launch an uprising during Democratic convention in Chicago. Finally, Weber illuminates role of Union soldiers, who, furious at Copperhead attacks on war effort, moved firmly behind Lincoln. The soldiers' support for embattled president kept him alive politically in his darkest times, and their victories on battlefield secured his re-election. Disgraced after war, Copperheads melted into shadows of history. Here, Jennifer L. Weber illuminates their dramatic story. Packed with sharp observation and fresh interpretations, Copperheads is a gripping account of fierce dissent that Lincoln called the fire in rear.

Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850-1877

Much recent scholarship has challenged the idea that racial ideology is primarily a national system by pointing to transnational aspects of racism, but in Never One Nation, Linda Frost comes at the problem from the reverse angle. In her lively and wide-ranging study of racial caricature in nineteenth-century U.S. popular culture, she not only gives racism a habitation and a name, but she insists that the habitation is more provincial than we have considered it. Accordingly, Frost's localities are numerous. Chapter 1 compares Minnesota newspaper representations of Sioux during the Dakota wars with P. T. Barnum's Sioux exhibits in his American Museum in New York and with Northern periodicals' descriptions of Confederate soldiers as savage Indians. Chapter 2 juxtaposes popular fantasies about the violent proclivities of freed slaves with representations of Civil War draft riots whose violence was largely carried out against slaves. Chapter 3 returns to Barnum, whose exhibits of Circassian beauties supposedly liberated from Turkish slave markets played on Northern anxieties about wage slavery and prostitution. Chapters 4 and 5 examine Confederate periodicals that demonized Yankees in order to delineate the boundaries of the Confederate nation. Chapter 6 moves to California, where the completion of the transcontinental railroad spawned new anxieties about Chinese laborers. The final chapter stays in California, but turns to women's rights activists whose attacks against marriage laws and other institutions of patriarchy were seen in the popular press to undermine the fragile dominance of white men over other races.

The devil's own work: the Civil War draft riots and the fight to reconstruct America

The devil's own work: the Civil War draft riots and the fight to reconstruct America

Paddy Jumps Jim Crow: Irish-Americans and Blackface Minstrelsy

Paddy Jumps Jim Crow:Irish-Americans and Blackface Minstrelsy Robert Nowatzki (bio) At the end of the 1820s, a decade that witnessed the first wave of mass immigration of Irish Catholics into the US, two related events occurred that had an enormous impact on each other and on American culture during the mid-nineteenth century.1 The first event was the emergence of blackface stage entertainment, popularized by Thomas Dartmouth Rice's "Jim Crow" song and dance and George Washington Dixon's performance of "Coal Black Rose."2 The second event was the inauguration of Andrew Jackson with his brand of white working-class male democracy that reached out to Irish-American men. Two decades later, another influx of Irish immigrants, those escaping the Great Famine, began arriving a few years [End Page 162] after four white entertainers formed a troupe called the Virginia Minstrels whose initial performance in New York City in early 1843 would set the format for the minstrel show.3 Although the rise of blackface minstrelsy to prominence during the peak periods of Irish Catholic immigration may at first seem to be a mere coincidence, the presence of Irish-Americans left an indelible mark on the development of minstrelsy, which in turn shaped how Irish-Americans saw themselves (as well as their relations with native white Americans and African-Americans) and were seen by other Americans. As minstrel performers, audiences, and characters, Irish-Americans helped to shape the meanings of blackness, whiteness, ethnicity, and American nationalism—all issues that dominated the minstrel stage during the mid-nineteenth century. This essay argues that the relationship between Irish-Americans and minstrelsy assumed two seemingly contradictory forms, though the differences between them were more of a historical shift than a paradox. At first, minstrelsy was a means for native-born white Americans to perpetuate negative stereotypes of the Irish (along with African-Americans and other ethnic groups). Native white minstrels often ridiculed Irish-Americans as characters, partly because they often saw the Irish as racial Others in some ways similar to African-Americans (the main target of racist minstrel humor), and partly because of the blending of and similarities between African-American and Irish-American cultures. Later, however, Irish-American minstrel performers gradually became more "white" and "American" as a result of denigrating (or at least differentiating themselves from) African-Americans—by performing their Irishness in ways that were less derogatory than the "stage Irishman" stereotype and by asserting their American patriotism. The extent to which Irish-American minstrel performers consciously purchased their whiteness through minstrelsy, and specifically by ridiculing African-Americans, is uncertain; what is important, I [End Page 163] believe, is that white status and "Americanness" were to some extent caused by Irish-American involvement in minstrelsy.4 Throughout this essay I examine minstrel songs and programs as well as essays and newspaper articles dealing with minstrelsy to track how Irish-Americans defined themselves and were defined by native whites. I also briefly analyze two recent novels—Wesley Brown's Darktown Strutters and Peter Quinn's Banished Children of Eve—that depict minstrelsy at length (it is the central focus of Brown's novel and is prominent in Quinn's); portray the New York City Draft Riots; and include Irish-American minstrel performers, some of whom are based on historical figures.5 I argue that both novels depict how the ambiguous status of Irish-Americans in relation to African-Americans and native whites complicates black/ white racial dichotomies. In making connections between Irish-Americans and minstrelsy, the novels dramatize how the meanings of Irishness were contested and were defined by the relations of Irish-Americans with African-Americans and native-born American [End Page 164] whites, and how Irish-American minstrels used the minstrel stage to construct "white" and "American" identities. The depictions of Irish-Americans and their involvement in blackface minstrelsy reveal their complex situation in American society not only in their relationship to African-Americans and native-born whites but also to the cultural meanings and national origins of minstrelsy itself. The main source for the ridicule of Irish-Americans in American minstrelsy was the stage Irishman of English theater during the nineteenth century, but...

The Devil's Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America

The Devil's Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America

Drawing Civil War Soldiers

News illustrations and editorial cartoons in Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, the two major illustrated news weeklies of the time, have been credited with directly aiding Civil War enlistment efforts in the North. This article uses illustrations and editorial cartoons published from 1861 to 1864 in both weeklies to demonstrate that while they supported voluntary enlistments and bounties, Harper's supported the Civil War draft while Leslie's did not. The difference in editorial positions regarding the draft was heightened by coverage of the draft riots in 1863. Harper's played down the riots and limited coverage primarily to a two-page spread depicting ape-like, Irish rioters committing acts of violence. Leslie's carried considerably more coverage, depicting less chaotic “rioters” and used riot illustrations on its cover.

Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850-1877 (review)

Reviewed by: Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850–1877 Kenneth Salzer Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850–1877. By Linda Frost. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 264 pp. $60.00/$20.00 paper. Borrowing the notion of "blinding whiteness" from Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark (ix), Linda Frost's insightful book analyzes what she sees as a nineteenth-century phenomenon: [End Page 207] "the rhetorical manipulation of racialized, blackened others that defines Americanness by contrast, in shadow" (xi). But while Morrison focuses on an Africanist presence, Frost boldly posits that the "others" employed to fashion a white American identity varied from region to region, conflict to conflict, and publication to publication. Never One Nation covers a short yet tumultuous period of history (1850–1877) that also saw the surge of popular periodicals. These texts, designed to serve and delineate particular communities of readers, indicate that "race as a category of otherness is a discursive formation"—one whose expression is not monolithic or monochromatic (xiv). Demonstrating her thesis, Frost details how newspapers covering the Dakota wars of 1862 "relied on different rhetorical and racialized others to promote their nationally defined yet regionally aligned agendas" (2). When describing the Indian uprisings in Minnesota, local periodicals used a "discourse of savagery" to depict Native Americans in ways that reinforced readers' perspectives (18). For example, the St. Paul Pioneer and Democrat painted Indians as a threat to white Christian expansion, which could only be ensured through continued military and economic support. The New York-based Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, on the other hand, connected the Dakota wars to the Civil War, thereby marking Confederates as "savages" eager to destroy the "civilized" Union. Frost continues her discussion of the North in the next two chapters, which explore "emancipation anxiety" in the wake of Lincoln's Proclamation of 1863 (31). In their reporting of the city's Draft Riots later that year, she explains, New York newspapers fixated on "a fantasized black uprising," rather than the "very real white one" that targeted African Americans and Irish immigrants alike (36). This is the least compelling section of the book, probably because it closely follows the work of race historians like Noel Ignatiev. Frost is more persuasive, though, when she reveals how P. T. Barnum "recreated slavery as spectacle" by exhibiting the Circassian Beauty in 1864 (56). This female figure, represented as a pure white slave, calmed audiences' fears that emancipation would blur racial and national lines. Frost's sharp examination of press releases and postcards shows how this Beauty—"the perfect realization of Victorian American womanhood"—was held captive "by a white Northern gaze" (79, 78). Chapters four and five mark the most enlightening part of Never One Nation, as they consider Southern periodicals that emerged briefly during the Civil War. Richmond's Southern Illustrated News, for example, filled its pages with "the racialized others inherent and necessary to [the Confederacy's] definition" (87). While slaves served as handy figures in this process, Frost stresses that "the African-American slave of the Confederate press is less a racialized alien and more a racialized foundation for the Confederacy itself" (88). In contrast, the Yankee was "racialized using a language of Christian morality" that "effectively alienated the figure . . . from the Confederate nation and therefore helped its ideological definition" (115). To illustrate her unique argument, Frost discusses Paddy McGann; or, the Demon of the Stump, a serialized 1863 novel by William Gilmore Simms whose Southern hero must banish the demon (read: Northerner) that haunts him (121–35). At the opposite end of the country, Western periodicals addressed parallel concerns of communal identity with the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. San Francisco's Golden Era and Overland Monthly expressed this anxiety through their depictions of Chinese immigrants—"the region's most visible, exploitable, and consequently threatening cultural other" (142). While these foreigners proved useful targets for white Californians, Frost goes one step further and notes how, "[a]t crucial moments, . . . the Chinese begin [End Page 208] to be confused or collapsed into a different Easterner...

On Forgetting: Thomas Nast, the Middle Class, and the Visual Culture of the Draft Riots

In September of 1863, Thomas Nast produced a seemingly bucolic scene of children at play, The Attack on the “Home Guard,” for the lithographic firm of Currier and Ives (Figure 1). Organized around a strange confrontation, in which a dog bites at the pant leg of a little boy in a military uniform as another, nonuniformed boy stabs at the dog with a bayonettipped rifle, the print diverges from sentimental 19th-century envisionings of middle-class domestic life by including an act of violence in the normally sanctified space of the home. Not surprisingly, the unusual content and ambiguous tone of The Attack on the “Home Guard” has puzzled historians of visual culture. When read in the context of contemporaneous popular illustration, however, the elusive meaning of Nast's lithograph begins to take shape.

New York City’s mid-19th century underworld: a history, a novel, a film

New York City’s mid-nineteenth century underworld has received considerable attention during the last two years. The «dangerous classes» and their neighborhoods are a major subject of Tyler Anbinder’s history of the Five Points (the intersection of five streets in lower Mahattan, now covered by court buildings and Chinatown), and the characters and setting of Kevin Baker’s novel and Martin Scorcese’s film. A focal event in each is the 1863 Draft Riots, when poor New Yorkers disrupted military...

John E. Wool and the New York City Draft Riots of 1863: A Reassessment

John E. Wool and the New York City Draft Riots of 1863: A Reassessment

In the shadow of slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863

black experience in the antebellum South has been thoroughly documented. But histories set in the North are few. the Shadow of Slavery, then, is a big and ambitious book, one in which insights about race and class in New York City abound. Leslie Harris has masterfully brought more than two centuries of African American history back to life in this illuminating new work.-David Roediger, author of Wages of Whiteness In 1991 in lower Manhattan, a team of construction workers made an astonishing discovery. Just two blocks from City Hall, under twenty feet of asphalt, concrete, and rubble, lay the remains of an eighteenth-century Negro Burial Ground. Closed in 1790 and covered over by roads and buildings throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the site turned out to be the largest such find in North America, containing the remains of as many as 20,000 African Americans. The graves revealed to New Yorkers and the nation an aspect of American history long hidden: the vast number of enslaved blacks who labored to create our nation's largest city. the Shadow of Slavery lays bare this history of African Americans in New York City, starting with the arrival of the first slaves in 1626, moving through the turbulent years before emancipation in 1827, and culminating in one of the most terrifying displays of racism in U.S. history, the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. Drawing on extensive travel accounts, autobiographies, newspapers, literature, and organizational records, Leslie M. Harris extends beyond prior studies of racial discrimination by tracing the undeniable impact of African Americans on class, politics, and community formation and by offering vivid portraits of the lives and aspirations of countless black New Yorkers. Written with clarity and grace, the Shadow of Slavery is an ambitious new work that will prove indispensable to historians of the African American experience, as well as anyone interested in the history of New York City.

Coming Attractions: "Lamia" and Cinematic Sensation

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle The visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination.... Pornographic films are thus only the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body. Fredric Jameson, Signature of the Visible IN THEIR MORDANTLY CLEVER 1991 STEAM PUNK NOVEL, THE DIFFERENCE Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling depict an alternative Victorian reality marked by technology--steam computers--and historical events--an independent Manhattan island following the Civil War draft riots--which superimpose the what if of science fiction onto 1855 Great Britain and the world. The book also suggests a different relation between English romantic and Victorian culture in the guise of various romantic personages whose destinies take a skewed turn in this reality, most notably the elderly British prime-minister Lord Byron, infamous for his betrayal of the Radical turned Revolutionary movement, and his daughter Ada, mathematical genius and computer hacker, or clacker. Appearing for several pages is also John Keats, a little fellow with clever blue eyes and graying hair who has quit versifying and entered the profession of kinotropy, entertaining London through shows based on a steam-powered technology of moving images. (1) As small and fanciful as it is, the Keats cameo is also a provocative one, for two reasons. First, Keats's appearance wittily resonates with one of the key ideas motivating film history today, the connection between early and pre-cinema. Second, Gibson and Sterling quite rightly make this point through the person of John Keats, the British romantic poet whose 1819 poem, Lamia, allegorizes the conflicted social and epistemological principles of visuality implicit in pre- and early as historic institutions of modernity. Keats and his poem occupy this position because of the overlapping meanings in studies of pre-cinema and the poet (and, indeed, romanticism) of the term sensation. As is well known, Tom Gunning and others have argued for a new understanding of cinematic history, in which demonstrations of early film are in continuity with other nineteenth-century American, British, and European forms of mass entertainment and public recreation, the spectacle of carnivals, circuses, exhibitions, peep shows, and urban amusements that have come to characterize the advent of capitalist modernity. Early is thus an extension of pre-cinema, rather than a separate social and artistic formation; in Gunning's famous phrase, the display and viewing of early film constitute a cinema of whose power lies more in technological wonderment over this new medium of the visual than in any glimpse of the future movie-going pleasures of narration and character identification associated with classical cinema. (2) Like other forms of pre-cinema entertainment, the of attractions is more properly an appeal to the senses; film is a form of sensation, that, as a part of the mass entertainment of the nineteenth-century public, is sensational, and sensationalized. Traditional literary criticism, in an aesthetic manner that at first seems quite different from the socio-historic value of pre-cinema studies, has long associated Keats with a poetics of the senses--of sensation as the sensual. (3) If romanticism has long been characterized by the division between the material and the ideal, and if that distinction seems in a romantic work to be tipped in favor of material and phenomenal experience, a discussion of Keats is oftentimes close at hand. Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to say that Keats is the best argument for an aesthetics of sensation, both thematic and expressive, in English literature. But, of course, that very same characterization has long been used to dismiss Keats, and romantic poetry, as bad literature--or as something besides literature altogether. …