Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum

Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum - Paperback

$23.00
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Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum
  • Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum
Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum - Paperback

Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum - Paperback

by Tyler Anbinder
$23.00
$23.00

Book Overview

All but forgotten today, the Five Points neighborhood in Lower Manhattan was once renowned the world over. From Jacob Riis to Abraham Lincoln, Davy Crockett to Charles Dickens, Five Points both horrified and inspired everyone who saw it. While it comprised only a handful of streets, many of America's most impoverished African Americans and Irish, Jewish, German, and Italian immigrants sweated out their existence there. Located in today's Chinatown, Five Points witnessed more riots, scams, prostitution, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in America. But at the same time it was a font of creative energy, crammed full of cheap theaters, dance halls, and boxing matches. It was also the home of meeting halls for the political clubs and the machine politicians who would come to dominate not just the city but an entire era in American politics.Drawing from letters, diaries, newspapers, bank records, police reports, and archaeological digs, Anbinder has written the first-ever history of Five Points, the neighborhood that was a microcosm of the American immigrant experience. The story that Anbinder tells is the classic tale of America's immigrant past, as successive waves of new arrivals fought for survival in a land that was as exciting as it was dangerous, as riotous as it was culturally rich.
ISBN9781439141557
Author Tyler Anbinder
PublisherFree Press
GenreHistory
FormatPaperback
PublishedSeptember 2010
LanguageENG- English
Pages544
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

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More by Tyler Anbinder

Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum

Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum - Paperback

Five Points: The 19th Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum - Paperback

By Tyler Anbinder

About Tyler Anbinder

Tyler Anbinder is an emeritus professor of history at George Washington University, where he taught courses on the history of American immigration and the American Civil War era. He is the author of three award-winning books and of numerous articles, and his publications have been honored with the Avery Craven Prize of the Organization of American Historians, the Mark Lynton History Prize of the Columbia School of Journalism, and the Hubbell Prize of the Society of Civil War Historians. Anbinder has also held the Fulbright Commission's Thomas Jefferson Distinguished Chair in American History at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and has won three prestigious research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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