City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York

David Henkin

"A strikingly original account of a new kind of literacy in mid-nineteenth century New York City." — Konstantin Dierks, Journal of the Early Republic

"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 Coming of Industrial Order

"City Reading is great fun to read, and it is 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

Series

• Popular Cultures, Everyday Lives

About the Author

David Henkin is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.

top of page