"Greenwich Village represents American social science during the interwar years at its best. It remains the best community study of New York, important both for its innovative method and for its substantive findings about intergroup relations in a pluralistic, open, and urban society--during a period of crisis and reform ferment."--Thomas Bender, New York University

A vibrant portrait of a celebrated urban enclave at the turn of the twentieth century.

This work represents the first comparative study of the folk revival movement in Anglophone Canada and the United States and combines this with discussion of the way folk music intersected with, and was structured by, conceptions of national affinity and national identity. Based on original archival research carried out principally in Toronto, Washington and Ottawa, it is a thematic, rather than general, study of the movement which has been influenced by various academic disciplines, including history, musicology and folklore. Dr Gillian Mitchell begins with an introduction that provides vital context for the subject by tracing the development of the idea of 'the folk', folklore and folk music since the nineteenth century, and how that idea has been applied in the North American context, before going on to examine links forged by folksong collectors, artists and musicians between folk music and national identity during the early twentieth century. With the 'boom' of the revival in the early sixties came the ways in which the movement in both countries proudly promoted a vision of nation that was inclusive, pluralistic and eclectic. It was a vision which proved compatible with both Canada and America, enabling both countries to explore a diversity of music without exclusiveness or narrowness of focus. It was also closely linked to the idealism of the grassroots political movements of the early 1960s, such as integrationist civil rights, and the early student movement. After 1965 this inclusive vision of nation in folk music began to wane. While the celebrations of the Centennial in Canada led to a re-emphasis on the 'Canadianness' of Canadian folk music, the turbulent events in the United States led many ex-revivalists to turn away from politics and embrace new identities as introspective singer-songwriters. Many of those who remained interested in traditional folk music styles, such as Celtic or Klezmer music, tended to be very insular and conservative in their approach, rather than linking their chosen genre to a wider world of folk music; however, more recent attempts at 'fusion' or 'world' music suggest a return to the eclectic spirit of the 1960s folk revival. Thus, from 1945 to 1980, folk music in Canada and America experienced an evolving and complex relationship with the concepts of nation and national identity. Students will find the book useful as an introduction, not only to key themes in the folk revival, but also to concepts in the study of national identity and to topics in American and Canadian cultural history. Academic specialists will encounter an alternative perspective from the more general, broad approach offered by earlier histories of the folk revival movement.

Jay Dolan transformed the writing of American Catholic history a quarter-century ago by telling the story from the bottom up instead of from the top down. In recent years a number of parish histories have appeared that reflect and expand this new methodology. They successfully relate the life of a local faith community to the larger religious and secular world of which it is a part, and reciprocally illuminate that bigger world from the perspective of this local community. St. Joseph's Church in Greenwich Village offers a fruitful opportunity for this kind of history. During the life span of this parish, the Catholic community in New York City has grown from a mere thirty or forty thousand to over three million in two dioceses. St. Joseph's Church began as a poor immigrant parish in a hostile Protestant environment, developed into a prosperous working-class parish as the area became predominantly Catholic, survived a series of local economic and social upheavals, and remains today a vibrant spiritual center in the midst of an overwhelmingly secular neighborhood. Its history provides a fascinating glimpse of the evolution of Catholicism in New York City during the course of the past 175 years. The history of this parish is worth telling for its own sake as the collective journey of one faith community from immigrant mission to pillar of society and then to spiritual outpost in the Secular City. However, it has significance far beyond the boundaries of Greenwich Village because it documents at the most basic and vital level of Catholic communal organization the interaction between change and continuity that has been one of the most prominent features of urban Catholicism in the United States over the past two centuries.

Capturing the lively modernist milieu of Kenneth Burke’s early career in Greenwich Village, where Burke arrived in 1915 fresh from high school in Pittsburgh, this book discovers him as an intellectual apprentice conversing with “the moderns.” Burke found himself in the midst of an avant-garde peopled by Malcolm Cowley, Marianne Moore, Jean Toomer, Katherine Anne Porter, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Hart Crane, Alfred Stieglitz, and a host of other fascinating figures. Burke himself, who died in 1993 at the age of 96, has been hailed as America’s most brilliant and suggestive critic and the most significant theorist of rhetoric since Cicero. Many schools of thought have claimed him as their own, but Burke has defied classification and indeed has often been considered a solitary, eccentric genius immune to intellectual fashions. But Burke’s formative work of the 1920s, when he first defined himself and his work in the context of the modernist conversation, has gone relatively unexamined. Here we see Burke living and working with the crowd of poets, painters, and dramatists affiliated with Others magazine, Stieglitz’s “291” gallery, and Eugene O’Neill’s Provincetown Players; the leftists associated with the magazines The Masses and Seven Arts; the Dadaists; and the modernist writers working on literary journals like The Dial, where Burke in his capacity as an associate editor saw T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” into print for the first time and provided other editorial services for Thomas Mann, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and many other writers of note. Burke also met the iconoclasts of the older generation represented by Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken, the New Humanists, and the literary nationalists who founded Contact and The New Republic. Jack Selzer shows how Burke’s own early poems, fiction, and essays emerged from and contributed to the modernist conversation in Greenwich Village. He draws on a wonderfully rich array of letters between Burke and his modernist friends and on the memoirs of his associates to create a vibrant portrait of the young Burke’s transformation from aesthete to social critic.

Handsomely illustrated and engagingly written, New York Modern documents the impressive collective legacy of New York's artists in capturing the energy and emotions of the urban experience.

An illuminating history of Washington Square Park and its inhabitants.

NYC tour guides and authors James and Michelle Nevius explore the lives of 20 iconic New Yorkers—from Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant to Alexander Hamilton, park architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, Jr.—and use them to guide the reader through four centuries of the city’s story. Beginning with the oldest standing building in the city, , a 1652 farmhouse in Brooklyn, and journeying all the way to the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, the book follows in the footsteps of these iconic New Yorkers. The authors tell the stories of everyone from slave traders and long-forgotten politicians to the movers and shakers of Gilded Age society and the Greenwich Village folk scene. One part history and one part personal narrative, Footprints in New York creates a different way of looking at the past, exploring new connections and forgotten chapters in the story of America’s greatest metropolis. Visit www.footprintsinny.com for more.