Civic wars : democracy and public life in the American city during the nineteenth century / Mary P. Ryan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ryan, Mary P., Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political participation--History--19th century--United States.

Political participation.

Political culture--United States--History--19th century.

Political culture.

Democracy--History--19th century--United States.

Democracy.

City and town life--History--19th century--United States.

City and town life.

United States--Politics and government--19th century.

United States.

New York (N.Y.)--Politics and government--To 1898.

New York (N.Y.).

New Orleans (La.)--Politics and government.

New Orleans (La.).

San Francisco (Calif.)--Politics and government.

San Francisco (Calif.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (392 p.) : 44 illustrations

Edition:

Reprint 2019

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [1997]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Mary P. Ryan traces the fate of public life and the emergence of ethnic, class, and gender conflict in the nineteenth-century city in this ambitious retelling of a key period of American political and social history. Basing her analysis on three quite different citiesNew York, New Orleans, and San FranciscoRyan illustrates how city spaces were used, understood, and fought over by a dazzling variety of social groups and political forces. She finds that the democratic exuberance America enjoyed in the 1820s and 1840s was irrevocably damaged by the Civil War. Civic life rebounded after the War but was, in Ryan's words, "less public, less democratic, and more visibly scarred by racial bigotry. "Ryan's analysis is played out on three different levelsthe spatial, the ceremonial, and the political. As she follows the decline of informal democracy from the age of Jackson to the heyday of industrial capitalism, she finds the roots of America's resilient democratic culture in the vigorous, often belligerent urban conflicts that found expression in the social movements, riots, celebrations, and other events that punctuated daily life in these urban centers. With its insightful comparisons, meticulous research, and graceful narrative, this study illustrates the ways in which American cities of the nineteenth century were as full of cultural differences and as fractured by social and economic changes as any metropolis today.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction: From Public Realm to Civic Warfare

CHAPTER 1. People's Places

CHAPTER 2. The Performance of People in Association

CHAPTER 3. Public Meetings and the "Principles of Pure Democracy"

CHAPTER 4. Civil Wars in the Cities

CHAPTER 5. The ccVague and Vast Harmony" of People in Space

CHAPTER 6. The People in Ceremony: Multiply, Divide, Explode, Transcend

CHAPTER 7. Publicity and Democratic Practice

EPILOGUE

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 341-362) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780520922082

0520922085

9780585041070

0585041075

OCLC:

1153507374