My Account Wish List
Advanced Search
Print - Close Window
www.greenwood.com/catalog/C8538.aspx
All Greenwood Products
The Bowery Boys Street Corner Radicals and the Politics of Rebellion
Peter Adams
ISBN: 0-275-98538-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-275-98538-7
192 pages
Praeger Publishers
Publication: 3/30/2005
List Price: $41.95 (UK Sterling Price: £28.95)
Discount Price: $20.98 Sale Price for U.S. Customers Only. Save 50%. Ends 12/31/2009.
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects: Reviews:
  • [A] good story ... we emerge at the end with greatly increased knowledge of the Democratic Party, the Whig Party, Tammany Hall and the social conditions of New York in the middle of the nineteenth century.
    —Journal of American Studies     2007
  • Did these leaders speak much to or for American workers? The evidence make clear only that they speak to historians in search of an American radical tradition.
    —American Studies     Summer 2005
Description: In the decades before the Civil War, the miserable living conditions of New York City's lower east side nurtured the gangs of New York. This book tells the story of the Bowery Boys, one gang that emerged as part urban legend and part street fighters for the city's legions of young workers. Poverty and despair led to a gang culture that was easily politicized, especially under the leadership of Mike Walsh who led a distinct faction of the Bowery Boys that engaged in the violent, almost anarchic, politics of the city during the 1840s and 1850s. Amid the toppled ballot boxes and battles for supremacy on the streets, many New Yorkers feared Walsh's gang was at the frontline of a European-style revolution.

A radical and immensely popular voice in antebellum New York, Walsh spoke in the unvarnished language of class conflict. Admired by Walt Whitman and feared by Tammany Hall, Walsh was an original, wildly unstable character who directed his aptly named Spartan Band against the economic and political elite of New York City and New England. As a labor organizer, state legislator, and even U.S. Congressman, the leader of the Bowery Boys fought for shorter working hours, the right to strike, free land for settlers on the American frontier, against child labor, and to restore dignity to the city's growing number of industrial workers.
Table of Contents:
  • The Bowery Boys: Shirtless and Unterrified
    The Bowery Boys: Radical in Everything
    On to Providence: B'hoys
    Workies, Loco Focos, and the Subterranean Masses
    Go West Young Proletary
    The Bowery Boy Goes to Washington
    Boss Rule and the Eclipse of the Bowery Boys
    Notes
    Bibliography
    Index
About the Author: Peter Adams is a freelance writer. A former journalist, his work has appeared in newspapers for the Gannett chain, including USA Today, as well as in publications that specialize in national security issues. He lives in the Washington, D.C., area.
All rights reserved. Copyright © 1999-2009 ABC-CLIO
130 Cremona Dr., Santa Barbara, CA 93117 805-968-1911