Recommended Reading

David J. Pivar, Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868–1900 (1973); Charlotte G. Borst, Catching Babies: The Professionalization of Childbirth, 1870–1920 (1995); Evelynn Hammonds, Childhood’s Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880–1930 (1999); Wanda A. Hendricks, Gender, Race, and Politics in the Midwest: Black Club Women in Illinois (1998); Nicola Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (1997); Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (1999); Nicola Kay Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (1997); and Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions (1994), are helpful on the topic of women in urban society.

On science and technology, helpful books are Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876 (1987); Maureen Ogle, All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840–1890 (1996); Mark Rose, Cities of Light and Heat: Domesticating Gas and Electricity in Urban America (1995); and Cecelia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (1987). James Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893 (1991); Ross Miller, American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago (1990); and Arnold Lewis, An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago’s Loop, and the World’s Colombian Exposition (1997), are helpful.

On education, see Barbara Beatty, Preschool Education in America (1995); Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876–1950 (1988); James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (1988); and Ronald Butchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction, Freedmen’s Education, 1862–1875 (1980). See also Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (1992).

For immigration and urban growth, consult Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham: A History (2000); Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930 (1993); Mario Maffi, Gateway to the Promised Land: Ethnic Cultures on New York’s Lower East Side (1995); John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (1999); Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1998); Patricia Mooney Melvin, The Organic City (1987); and Stuart Galishoff, Newark: The Nation’s Unhealthiest City, 1832–1895 (1988).

See also Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (1996); S. W. Pope, Patriotic Games: Sporting Traditions in the American Imagination, 1876–1926 (1997); Ronald L. Numbers, Darwinism Comes to America (1998); Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926 (1998); David Robinson, From Peep Show to Palace: The Birth of American Film (1996); Paulette D. Kilmer, The Fear of Sinking: The American Success Formula in the Gilded Age (1996); Kathy Lee Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986); Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence (1990); Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (1981); Mina Carson, Settlement Folk: Social Thought in the American Settlement Movement, 1885–1930 (1990); Rivka Shpak Lissak, Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919 (1989); and Ruth Hutchinson Crocker, Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889–1930 (1992).