Mysteries of the City is a narrative history of the Lexow
Committee investigation —its origins, its exposures and its
legacies. A story rich with complex characters from every walk of
New York life, it reveals how the struggle to control and exploit
the city’s underworld shaped metropolitan politics and culture. The
term “underworld” itself, first popularized in the 1890s, is best
understood as a web of relationships, based on reciprocal services,
whereby people gain power, profit or pleasure from the city’s vice
economy: the underside of urban life centered around commercial
sex, the alcohol trade, gambling, theft, counterfeiting, blood
sport and plebian entertainments.
Date
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Time
12:15 p.m.
Location
Council Hall, Queens campus
Speaker
Daniel Czitrom, Ph.D.
Daniel Czitrom has been teaching American cultural and political
history at Mount Holyoke College since 1981. He is coauthor, with
Bonnie Yochelson, of the forthcoming Rediscovering Jacob
Riis. He is also coauthor of Out of Many: A History of the
American People (5th ed. 2006), which was banned from Texas
high schools in 2003. His Media and the American Mind: From
Morse to McLuhan (1982) received the American Historical
Association’s First Book Award and has been translated into Chinese
and Spanish. His current book project focuses on the history of New
York City’s underside and its uneasy relationship to the larger
nation
More information
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Student Life (718) 990-6567