Between 1873 and 1935, reformers in Chicago used the power of music to unify the diverse peoples of the metropolis. These musical progressives emphasized the capacity of music to transcend differences among various groups. Sounds of Reform looks at the history of efforts to propagate this vision and the resulting encounters between activists and ethnic, immigrant, and working-class residents.Musical progressives sponsored free concerts and music lessons at neighborhood par...

The "compelling" story behind the 1995 Chicago weather disaster that killed hundreds—and what it revealed about our broken society ( Boston Globe).On July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day in which the temperature would reach 106 degrees. The heat index—how the temperature actually feels on the body—would hit 126. When the heat wave broke a week later, city streets had buckled; records for electrical use were shattered; and power grids had fail...

On the centennial of Joseph Mitchell's birth, here is a new edition of the classic collection containing his most celebrated pieces about New York City. Fifty years after its original publication, The Bottom of the Harbor is still considered a fundamental New York book. Every story Mitchell tells, every person he introduces, every scene he describes is illuminated by his passion for the eccentrics and eccentricities of his beloved adopted city.All of the pieces here are co...

Imagine shuffling down Broadway through the hustle and bustle right into the nonstop, neon heart of New York City: 42nd Street.Once a quiet neighborhood of brownstones and churches, the area wastransformed in the early 1900s into an entertainment hub unlike any in theworld. No place has ever evoked the glamour and romantic possibility of bigcity nightlife as vividly as did 42nd Street. It was the dazzle of "naughty, bawdy, gaudy" 42nd Street that put Times Square on the map and tur...

More than five decades have passed since Jane Jacobs wrote her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and since a front page headline in the New York Times read, "Cars Choking Cities as 'Urban Sprawl' Takes Over." Yet sprawl persists, and not by mistake. It happens for a reason. As an activist and a scholar, Benjamin Ross is uniquely placed to diagnose why this is so. Dead End traces how the ideal of a safe, green, orderly retreat where hardworking ...

Who among us cannot testify to the possibilities of the night? To the mysterious, shadowed intersections of music, smoke, money, alcohol, desire, and dream? The hours between dusk and dawn are when we are most urgently free, when high meets low, when tongues wag, when wallets loosen, when uptown, downtown, rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight, male, and female so often chance upon one another. Night is when we are more likely to carouse, fornicate, fall in love, murder,...

On a narrow street in a working-class neighborhood, the police are held at bay by a small band of armed radicals. Two assaults have already failed. After a morning-long battle involving machine guns, explosives, and tear gas, the radicals remain defiant. In a command post across the street from the boarded-up row house that serves as the militants’ headquarters, the beleaguered police commissioner weighs his options and decides on a new plan. He will bomb the house.Let It Burn is t...

First published in 1932, The Taxi-Dance Hall is Paul Goalby Cressey’s fascinating study of Chicago’s urban nightlife—as seen through the eyes of the patrons, owners, and dancers-for-hire who frequented the city’s notoriously seedy “taxi-dance” halls.Taxi-dance halls, as the introduction notes, were social centers where men could come and pay to dance with “a bevy of pretty, vivacious, and often mercenary” women. Ten cents per dance was the usual fee, with half the proceeds...

“The worst that Death can do to me is to deliver me up for ever to unsatisfied longings for you. Well, that is all that Life has done, that is all that Life can do, for me.”  After gambling with, and losing, money from his employer’s estate and fearing that discovery and a prison sentence is around the corner, the narrator decides to end his life rather than face up to the disgrace.  His last act on earth is to write a suicide note to the woman he has al...

Few cities are so dramatically identified with their environment as San Francisco—the landscape of hills, the expansive bay, the engulfing fog, and even the deadly fault line shifting below. Yet most residents think of the city itself as separate from the natural environment on which it depends. In Our Better Nature, Philip J. Dreyfus recounts the history of San Francisco from Indian village to world-class metropolis, focusing on the interactions between the city and the land and ...

 This concise, but comprehensive, story of San Diego is the sisth in the HarborTown History series. From its early history as a tribal homeland and its days of Mexican ranchos through the parade of entrepreneurs who transformed it into the lovely city it is today, its history is one of dreams, failures, trials, triumphs. 

These pages narrate the travels, in a popular sense, of an Alaskan exploring expedition. The expedition was organized with seven members at Vancouver Barracks, Washington, and left Portland, Oregon, ascending through the inland passage to Alaska, as far as the Chilkat country. At that point the party employed over three score of the Chilkat Indians, the hardy inhabitants of that ice-bound country, to pack its effects across the glacier-clad pass of the Alaskan coast range of mountains to t...