A study of ethnic life in the city, detailing the process of adjustment, cultural survival, and ethnic identification among groups such as the Irish, Ukrainians, African Americans, Asian Indians, and Swedes. New to this edition is a six-chapter section that examines ethnic institutions including saloons, sports, crime, churches, neighborhoods, and cemeteries. Includes bandw photos and illustrations. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

At approximately seven o’clock in the evening on May 7, 1950, Gordon Malherbe Hillman filled an empty bottle with water, capped it, and walked into his mother’s room in the pair’s fifth-floor suite at Boston’s luxurious Copley Plaza Hotel. He then edged up behind the semi-invalid woman and bludgeoned her to death. Hotel staff had planned to evict the two the following day after several weeks of unpaid rent. Mounting debts had finally broken the fifty-year-old Hillman, a now-struggling author of mixed success, but it had not always been that way, as Thomas Aiello shows in his study of the life and work of this forgotten midcentury figure. As a youth, Hillman attended the prestigious Noble and Greenough School near Boston. Pursuing a career as a writer, he published several dozen pieces of short fiction and a critically acclaimed novel, Fortune’s Cup (1941). Hollywood studios purchased the rights to two of his stories and made them into films, The Great Man Votes (1939) and Here I Am a Stranger (1940). But Hillman remained, for the most part, a middling magazine writer like the majority of fiction authors working during the Depression. Although most did not resort to acts of manic violence, Hillman’s tenuous position in literary circles, along with his gradual descent into financial ruin, proved a far more common tale than the stories of literary success often pored over by critics and historians of this period. In The Trouble in Room 519: Money, Matricide, and Marginal Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century, Aiello weaves a compelling true crime narrative into his exploration of the economics of magazine fiction and the strains placed on authors by the publishing industry prior to World War II. Examining Hillman’s writing as exemplary of Depression-era popular fiction, Aiello includes eight stories written by Hillman and originally published in prominent midcentury American magazines, including Collier’s, Liberty, and McCall’s, to provide additional context and insight into this trying time and tragic life.

The guide provides Research Publications' fiche and reel numbers, with their contents, for City directories of the United States in microform; segment 1 (pre 1860), segment 2 (1861-1881) and segment 3 (1882-1901).

Contemporary Archaeology and the City foregrounds the archaeological study of post-industrial and other urban transformations through a diverse, international collection of case studies. Over the past decade contemporary archaeology has emerged as a dynamic force for dissecting and contextualizing the material complexities of present-day societies. Contemporary archaeology challenges conventional anthropological and archaeological conceptions of the past by pushing temporal boundaries closer to, if not into, the present. The volume is organized around three themes that highlight the multifaceted character of urban transitions in present-day cities - creativity, ruination, and political action. The case studies offer comparative perspectives on transformative global urban processes in local contexts through research conducted in the struggling, post-industrial cities of Detroit, Belfast, Indianapolis, Berlin, Liverpool, Belém, and post-Apartheid Cape Town, as well as the thriving urban centres of Melbourne, New York City, London, Chicago, and Istanbul. Together, the volume contributions demonstrate how the contemporary city is an urban palimpsest comprised by archaeological assemblages - of the built environment, the surface, and buried sub-surface - that are traces of the various pasts entangled with one another in the present. This volume aims to position the city as one of the most important and dynamic arenas for archaeological studies of the contemporary by presenting a range of theoretically-engaged case studies that highlight some of the major issues that the study of contemporary cities pose for archaeologists.