Cultural historian David Henkin explores the influential but little-noticed role played by reading in New York City's public life between 1825 and 1865. From the opening of the Erie Canal to the end of the Civil War, New York became a metropolis, and demographic, economic, and physical changes erased the old markers of continuity and order.
As New York became a crowded city of strangers, everyday encounters with impersonal signs, papers, and bank notes altered people's perceptions of connectedness to the new world they lived in. The 'ubiquitous urban texts'--from newspapers to paper money, from street signs to handbills--became both indispensable urban guides and apt symbols for a new kind of public life that emerged first in New York. City Reading focuses on four principal categories of public reading: street signs and store signs; handbills and trade cards; newspapers; and paper money.
Drawing on a wealth of visual sources and written texts that document the changing cityscape--including novels, diaries, newspapers, municipal guides, and government records--Henkin shows that public acts of reading (to a much greater extent than private, solitary reading) determined how New Yorkers of all backgrounds came to define themselves and their urban community.
-Ingenious, imaginative, and thoroughly intelligent,City Reading is an admirable achievement. Focusing on sources ranging from advertising signs and posters to newspapers, banners, and paper currency, Henkin grapples not just with the content of these 'public' texts but also with how such word-filled materials were experienced by city dwellers who found them passing daily before their eyes and through their hands.
-Jonathan Prude -author of The Comming of Industrial Order -City Reading is great fun to read, and it ia full of fresh and insightful observations on how New Yorkers 'read' their city through a remarkable variety of public texts - outdoor signs, billboards and handbills, newspapers, and currency - in the first half of the nineteenth century. -Elizabeth Blackmar -author of Manhattan for Rent
There was once something novel in the spectacle of so many words, and something radical in the notion that buildings and streets ought to be marked.
Since national currency did not exist, the passing of dollar bills (notes of credit from banks of varying geographical locations and states of solvency) among strangers in public occasioned condeirably more reading.
From ancient times, the city has been a "special receptable for storing and transmitting messages."
Urban texts and reading practeices have not been accorded their propoer place in the history of the antebellum American city.
Cities were built, in part, of words, words that took material form in public space. Newspapers did not simply resemble the streets of Manhattan; they littered them as well.
The signs, cards, posters, newspapers, and bills described in this study provided new vehicles and new models for communication in an urban environment. Around these urban texts, a new kind of public was born.
Part of the resitance among historians of public life to examining signs and newspapers in the nineteenth-century stems from the ostensibly trivial character of their commerical content.
Well before recorded sound, radio, telehones, or television, New York was home to a complex network of institutions and tchnologies that spread th written word quickly troughout the city and well-beyond.
A full reckoning of these instiutions would have to include the common school, the postal system, the daguerreotype, the newsboy, and even the city grid, as well as more obvious candidates such as the cylinder press and the telegraph.
The shift from oral to literate practice figured in critiques of urban society and the decline of traditional, gemeinschaft, communal ties. In William Alexander Caruthers's 1834 novel; "The Kentuckian in New-York", a visitor from the South is surprised by New York elections, in which oratory, drinking, and brawls are replaced by "little bits of paper."
The northern United States in the eighteenth end nineteenth centuries did indeed boast extremely high literacy rates, even by the standards of the highly literate countries in Protestant Europe, and New York was no exception. According to the 1840 census, only 4 percent of the state's population was illiterate.
With only 2 percent of the nation's population in the 1850s, New york claimed 18 percent of the country's newspaper circulation, handled 22 percent of its mail, and produced over 37 percent of its total publishing revenue.