BiblioVault - Books about City and town life -

After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape and Lightscape of Ancient Cities
Nancy Gonlin
University Press of Colorado, 2022
Library of Congress HT114.A38 2022 | Dewey Decimal 307.7609

After Dark explores the experience of nighttime within ancient urban settings. Contributors present material evidence related to how ancient people manipulated and confronted darkness and night in urban landscapes, advancing our knowledge of the archaeology of cities, the archaeology of darkness and night, and lychnology (the study of ancient lighting devices).

Sensory archaeology focuses on the sensual experience of the nocturnal environment—the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feel of an ancient city—and the multi-faceted stimuli that diverse urban populations experienced in the dark. Contributors investigate night work—for example, standing guard or pursuing nocturnal trades—and nightlife, such as gambling at Chaco Canyon. They also examine how urban architecture, infrastructure, and the corresponding lighting were inextricably involved in enabling nighttime pursuits and signaling social status.

The subjects of the night, darkness, and illumination taken together form a comprehensive framework for analyzing city life. After Dark embraces night as a conceptual lens through which to view the material and visual cultures of the ancient world and, in doing so, demonstrates a wealth of activities, behaviors, and beliefs that took place between dusk and dawn. This perspective greatly enriches the understanding of urban life and its evolution and has much to offer archaeologists in deepening an examination of complexity and inequality. This volume will be of interest to any scholar or student of the past who is interested in urban activities and the significance of the night in urban settings.

Contributors: Susan M. Alt, J. Antonio Ochatoma Cabrera, Martha Cabrera Romero, Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, Kirby Farrah, Nancy Gonlin, Anna Guengerich, Christopher Hernandez, John Janusek, Kristin V. Landau, Maggie L. Popkin, Monica L. Smith, Meghan E. Strong, Susan Toby Evans, Robert S. Weiner

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After the West Was Won: Homesteaders and Town-Builders in Western South Dakota, 1900-1917
Paula M. Nelson
University of Iowa Press, 1989
Library of Congress F656.N45 1986 | Dewey Decimal 978.3031

"In this well-written monograph Paula M. Nelson tells the story of the settlement of 'west river country,' that part of South Dakota west of the Missouri River....Nelson's major contribution is her reconstruction of the social life of this generation of settlers....Nelson is particularly sensitive to the experience of pioneer women, both those who labored within the family and those single women who homesteaded on their own."--American Historical Review "After the West Was Won is an impressively researched and beautifully written study....Nelson also conveys the sense of pain and suffering that pioneers in western South Dakota endured; the technology of steam, electricity, and internal combustion failed to create utopia in a primitive area after the West was won."--Technology and Culture "Paula M. Nelson's account of the trials and tribulations of the pioneers of that flat, windswept plain is a welcome addition to the literature on the agricultural frontier."--Journal of American History

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Alliance, Illinois
Dave Etter
Northwestern University Press, 2005
Library of Congress PS3555.T68A8 2005 | Dewey Decimal 811.54

In the tradition of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, each of the 222 poems in this collection is narrated by a different resident of the fictional small town of Alliance, Illinois. Their voices, individual and yet familiar, describe the ordered simplicity of life in the American small town during the second half of the twentieth century. Dave Etter's themes and images come from the very lifeblood of prairie Illinois-rivers, trees, cornfields, wildlife, county fairs, railroads and, always, the people and the ever-changing seasons. Deceptively, invitingly simple on their surface, Etter's poems reveal upon careful examination a remarkable psychological insight and a careful craftsmanship. Alliance, Illinois is truly one of the great monuments of rural American literature.

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American Dictators: Frank Hague, Nucky Johnson, and the Perfection of the Urban Political Machine
Hart, Steven
Rutgers University Press, 2013
Library of Congress E747.H29 2013 | Dewey Decimal 974.90430922

One man was tongue-tied and awkward around women, in many ways a mama's boy at heart, although his reputation for thuggery was well earned. The other was a playboy, full of easy charm and ready jokes, his appetite for high living a matter of public record. One man tolerated gangsters and bootleggers as long as they paid their dues to his organization. The other was effectively a gangster himself, so crooked that he hosted a national gathering of America's most ruthless killers. One man never drank alcohol. The other, from all evidence, seldom drank anything else.

American Dictators is the dual biography of two of America’s greatest political bosses: Frank Hagueand Enoch “Nucky” Johnson. Packed with compelling information and written in an informal, sometimes humorous style, the book shows Hague and Johnson at the peak of their power and the strength of their political machines during the years of Prohibition and the Great Depression. Steven Hart compares how both men used their influence to benefit and punish the local citizenry, amass huge personal fortunes, and sometimes collaborate to trounce their enemies.

Similar in their ruthlessness, both men were very different in appearance and temperament. Hague, the mayor of Jersey City, intimidated presidents and wielded unchallenged power for three decades. He never drank and was happily married to his wife for decades. He also allowed gangsters to run bootlegging and illegal gambling operations as long as they paid protection money. Johnson, the political boss of Atlantic City, and the inspiration for the hit HBO series Boardwalk Empire, presided over corruption as well, but for a shorter period of time. He was notorious for his decadent lifestyle. Essentially a gangster himself, Johnson hosted the infamous Atlantic City conference that fostered the growth of organized crime.

Both Hague and Johnson shrewdly integrated otherwise disenfranchised groups into their machines and gave them a stake in political power. Yet each failed to adapt to changing demographics and circumstances. In American Dictators, Hart paints a balanced portrait of their accomplishments and their failures.

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Anonymous Connections: The Body and Narratives of the Social in Victorian Britain
Tina Young Choi
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Library of Congress PR464.C46 2015 | Dewey Decimal 302.094109034

Anonymous Connections asks how the Victorians understood the ethical, epistemological, and biological implications of social belonging and participation. Specifically, Tina Choi considers the ways nineteenth-century journalists, novelists, medical writers, and social reformers took advantage of spatial frames-of-reference in a social landscape transforming due to intense urbanization and expansion. New modes of transportation, shifting urban demographics, and the threat of epidemics emerged during this period as anonymous and involuntary forms of contact between unseen multitudes. While previous work on the early Victorian social body have tended to describe the nineteenth-century social sphere in static political and class terms, Choi’s work charts new critical terrain, redirecting attention to the productive—and unpredictable—spaces between individual bodies as well as to the new narrative forms that emerged to represent them. Anonymous Connections makes a significant contribution to scholarship on nineteenth-century literature and British cultural and medical history while offering a timely examination of the historical forebears to modern concerns about the cultural and political impact of globalization.

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Antebellum Jefferson, Texas: Everyday Life in an East Texas Town
Jacques D. Bagur
University of North Texas Press, 2012
Library of Congress F394.J3B34 2012 | Dewey Decimal 976.4193

Archaeology of Southern Urban Landscapes
Amy L Young
University of Alabama Press, 2000
Library of Congress F211.A74 2000 | Dewey Decimal 975.01

Groundbreaking essays in urban archaeology highlight the impact of towns and cities on the southern landscape

The rapid growth and development of urban areas in the South have resulted in an increase in the number of urban archaeology projects required by federal and state agencies. These projects provide opportunities not only to investigate marginal areas between the town and countryside but also to recover information long buried beneath the earliest urban structures. Such projects have also created a need for a one-volume update on archaeology as it is practiced in the urban areas of the southeastern United States.

Archaeology of Southern Urban Landscapes will assist practitioners and scholars in the burgeoning fields of urban and landscape archaeology by treating the South as a distinctive social, geographic, and material entity and by focusing on the urban South rather than the stereotypical South of rural plantations. The case studies in this volume span the entire southeastern United States, from Annapolis to New Orleans and from colonial times to the 19th century. The authors address questions involving the function of cities, interregional diversity, the evolution of the urban landscape, and the impact of the urban landscape on southern culture. By identifying the relationship between southern culture and the South's urban landscapes, this book will help us understand the built landscape of the past and predict future growth in the region.

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The Avenue, Clayton City
C. Eric Lincoln
Duke University Press, 1996
Library of Congress PS3562.I472A94 1996 | Dewey Decimal 813.54

The Avenue in C. Eric Lincoln’s fictional town is the principal residential street of the black community in Clayton City, a prototypical southern town languishing between the two world wars. Unpaved and marked by ditches full of frogs, snakes, and empty whiskey bottles on one side of town, it is the same street, though with a different name, that originates downtown. Only when it reaches the black section of Clayton City do the paving stop and the trash-filled ditches begin. On one side, it provides a significant address for the white people who live there. On the other, despite its rundown air, it is still the best address available to the town’s black population. Some of them, in fact, are willing to go to any extreme, including murder, to get there.
In this novel, originally published in 1988, Lincoln creates with deft skill the drama that rises from the lives of the people of Clayton City. In turn amusing, disgusting, enraging, wistful, and, as one hears the secrets hidden deep in their hearts, shocking, they exist in a place whose vibrant personality is itself a unique configuration of geography, relationships, patterns of behavior, and events. It is also a place whose unspoken and hidden power lies in its crushing compulsion to maintain itself as it already is—a power that forces everyone to succumb to an inflexible social order.

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