On a Sunday morning in early 1892, Reverend Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst ascended to his pulpit at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church in New York and delivered one of the most explosive sermons in the city's history. Municipal life, he charged, was morally corrupt. Vice was rampant. And the city's police force and its Tammany Hall politicians were"a lying, perjured, rum-soaked, and libidinous lot." Denounced by city and police officials as a self-righteous "blatherskite," Parkhurst resolved to prove his case. The bespectacled minister descended his pulpit and in disguise visited gin joints and brothels, taking notes and gathering evidence. Two years later, his findings forced the New York State Senate to investigate the New York Police Department. The Lexow Committee heard testimony from nearly 700 witnesses, who revealed in shocking-and headline-dominating-detail just how deeply the NYPD was involved in, and benefitted from, the vice economy. Parkhurst's campaign had kick-started the Progressive Movement. New York Exposed offers a narrative history of the first major crusade to clean up Gotham. Daniel Czitrom does full justice to this spellbinding story by telling it within the larger contexts of national politics, poverty, patronage, vote fraud and vote suppression, and police violence. The effort to root out corrupt cops and crooked politicians morphed into something much more profound: a public reckoning over what New York-and the American city-had become since the Civil War. Animated by as vivid a cast as New York has ever produced, the book's key characters include Police Superintendent Thomas Byrnes and Inspector Alexander "Clubber" Williams, the nation's most famous cops, as well as anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman, the zealous prosecutor John W. Goff, and an array of politicos, immigrant leaders, labor bosses, prostitutes, show-business entrepreneurs, counterfeiters, and reformers and muckrakers determined to change business as usual. New York Exposed offers an unforgettable portrait of a city in a truly transformative moment.

These new essays tell the stories of daring reporters, male and female, sent out by their publishers not to capture the news but to make the news--indeed to achieve star billing--and to capitalize on the Gilded Age public's craze for real-life adventures into the exotic and unknown. They examine the adventure journalism genre through the work of iconic writers such as Mark Twain and Nellie Bly, as well as lesser-known journalistic masters such as Thomas Knox and Eliza Scidmore, who took to the rivers and oceans, mineshafts and mountains, rails and trails of the late nineteenth century, shaping Americans' perceptions of the world and of themselves.

During the late 1870s, English reporter Harry H. Marks covered New York City in intimate and often idiosyncratic detail. He wrote about the tenements, Chinese immigrants, burglary tools, French communists, organ grinders, trained monkeys, and bohemians.These 30 stories, published in 1888 as "Small Change; or, Lights and Shades of New York" (1882), are being reprinted because they shine a rarely seen light on the common people of the city.Pawnbroker to the Rich: "See that solid silver pitcher; that was presented years ago to a well-known gentleman by A. T. Stewart, Wm. B. Astor, Brown Brothers and others. ? There on the side were the names of Stewart and Astor. I erased, them, and if you want to present it to Mayor Grace, I will engrave his name on it and give it to you cheap."Organ Grinders: "At all seasons of the year the organ-grinder, of all men, battens on the misfortunes of others; for, strange to say among a music-loving people, he is most liberally paid when the payment is conditional upon his going as far away as possible."Chinese Men: "Many Chinamen have found white wives and live happily with them. I had some conversation with a bright, intelligent Irish girl, the wife of a young Chinaman, and she told me that she was well satisfied with her lot ? because he was sober, kind, had plenty of money and did not run after other women.""An English Reporter in Gilded Age New York" is history as observation and reportage about people who never appear in the history books. Some of it is satirical ("The Midsummer Maiden"), some of it sad ("Women Who Work"), and some a celebration of life ("A Bavarian Fest Tag"). It's a book for those interested in New York City, the Gilded Age, and historical fiction. Marks' New York is unforgettable.

This book offers a one-stop reference work covering the Gilded Age and Progressive Era that serves teachers and their students. This book helps students to better understand key pieces in literature from the Gilded Age and Progressive Era by putting them in the context of history, society, and culture through historical context essays, literary analysis, chronologies, documents, and suggestions for discussion and further research. It provides teachers and students with selections that align with the ELA Common Core Standards and that also offer useful connections for curriculum that integrates American literature and social studies. The book covers Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, Willa Cather's A Lost Lady, and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Readers will be able to appreciate the significance of this period through these canonical and widely taught works of American literature. The book also includes historical context essays, primary document excerpts, and suggested readings.

American newspapers redefined journalism after the Civil War by breaking away from the editorial and financial control of the Democratic and Republican parties. Smythe chronicles the rise of the New Journalism, where pegging newspaper sales to market forces was the cost of editorial independence. Successful papers in post-bellum America thrived by catering to a mass audience, which increased their circulations and raised their advertising revenues. Still active politically, independent editors now sought to influence their readers' opinions themselves rather than serve as conduits for the party line.