The Bowery Boys Street Corner Radicals and the Politics of Rebellion

Subjects:

• History » American History -- Nineteenth Century
• Political Science » State & Local Politics

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

• Endorsement From Timothy Messer-Kruse,
  Associate Professor and Chair, History Department
  University of Toledo: Long before historians thought of studying "history from below," Bowery leader Mike Walsh self-consciously named his newspaper the Subterranean. Adams' study of the political life of the Bowery Boys digs deeply into this underground and reveals the nature of Jacksonian Democracy's left wing.
• Endorsement From Rick Shenkman
  author of Presidential Ambition: Forget the romantic picture of the Gangs of New York featured in the recent Hollywood movie. As Peter Adams ably demonstrates in this well-researched book, the Bowery Boys and others had been left behind by the market revolution that swept America in the 19th century, leading them to go embrace a radical political agenda.

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