Download or read book The Gangs of New York written by Herbert Asbury and published by . This book was released on 1928 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Real Gangs of New York written by Wallace Edwards and published by BookCaps Study Guides. This book was released on 2020-09-12 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ★★★ Is true better than fiction? ★★★ The subject of a classic history by Herbert Asbury and an Academy Award-nominated film by Martin Scorsese, the gangs of The Five Points in New York have become the stuff of legend. But how much is legend and how much is fact? In this short book, we examine the original gangs of the Five Points in New York and see how accurate the film was (spoiler alert: not very) and what Asbury may have gotten wrong in his original research on this era. From the Bowery Boys to the Dead Rabbits, we look at the gangs that operated not just in the Five Points, but also those who wanted a piece of the action there and engaged in gang wars that would leave even modern thugs quivering in their boots!
Download or read book Five Points written by Tyler Anbinder and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century NYC’s most dynamic and dangerous neighborhood comes vividly to life in this “careful, intelligent, and sympathetic history” (The New York Times Book Review). Located in today’s Chinatown, Five Points was home to poor immigrants and other marginalized communities. It witnessed more riots, scams, prostitution, and drunkenness than any other neighborhood in America. But at the same time it was a font of creative energy, crammed full of cheap theaters, dance halls, and boxing matches. It was also the home of meeting halls for the political clubs and the machine politicians who would come to dominate not just the city but an entire era in American politics. Drawing from letters, diaries, newspapers, bank records, police reports, and archaeological digs, Anbinder has written the first-ever history of Five Points, the neighborhood that was a microcosm of the American immigrant experience. The story that Anbinder tells is the classic tale of America’s immigrant past, as successive waves of new arrivals fought for survival in a land that was as exciting as it was dangerous, as riotous as it was culturally rich. A New York Times Notable Book
Download or read book Jamaican Gangs of New York written by Desmond Skyers and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2017-10-06 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In search of a better life, these new migrants arrived in New York City from the poverty-stricken and violent ghetto of Western Kingston, Jamaica. Predisposed to violence and experienced in the life of the street, they aged between twenty and thirty-five. They were different from all those that came before them from this exotic island. With the potential for a drug sale at any time, these new arrivals squared-off against one another in the streets of New York City, fighting for control of the illicit yet lucrative cocaine and crack market. From Brooklyn to Queens, Manhattan to the Bronx, the city was divided into three gang strongholds, basically no-go areas. Joe Dog and the Loyalist posse took control of South Jamaica, Queens; Blacka and the Raiders posse control Brooklyn; and Fowl and the Centralist posse controlled the Bronx. In addition to the Jamaicans, there were two black American gangs, one came out of Brooklyn and the other from Queens. When they crossed paths with the Jamaicans, it was war. Then there was the Gem Girls. This was a gang of girls from western Kingston led by a light-skinned lesbian named Patsy. These girls were as ruthless as their male Jamaican counterpart. The desire for instant gratification and material satisfaction was impetus for the violence and killings that followed. None dared to stand in their way. This violence caught the attention of the newly elected mayor Jack Jackson, who established a gang task force, headed up by a no-nonsense former Vietnam veteran named Todd Sullivan. On Todds first day on the job, he shook his head and swore. These fucking Jamaican posses are turning our city into a fucking killing zone. We are going to send every fucking one of them to prison.
Download or read book Vampires Dragons and Egyptian Kings written by Eric C. Schneider and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They called themselves "Vampires," "Dragons," and "Egyptian Kings." They were divided by race, ethnicity, and neighborhood boundaries, but united by common styles, slang, and codes of honor. They fought--and sometimes killed--to protect and expand their territories. In postwar New York, youth gangs were a colorful and controversial part of the urban landscape, made famous by West Side Story and infamous by the media. This is the first historical study to explore fully the culture of these gangs. Eric Schneider takes us into a world of switchblades and slums, zoot suits and bebop music to explain why youth gangs emerged, how they evolved, and why young men found membership and the violence it involved so attractive. Schneider begins by describing how postwar urban renewal, slum clearances, and ethnic migration pitted African-American, Puerto Rican, and Euro-American youths against each other in battles to dominate changing neighborhoods. But he argues that young men ultimately joined gangs less because of ethnicity than because membership and gang violence offered rare opportunities for adolescents alienated from school, work, or the family to win prestige, power, adulation from girls, and a masculine identity. In the course of the book, Schneider paints a rich and detailed portrait of everyday life in gangs, drawing on personal interviews with former members to re-create for us their language, music, clothing, and social mores. We learn what it meant to be a "down bopper" or a "jive stud," to "fish" with a beautiful "deb" to the sounds of the Jesters, and to wear gang sweaters, wildly colored zoot suits, or the "Ivy League look." He outlines the unwritten rules of gang behavior, the paths members followed to adulthood, and the effects of gang intervention programs, while also providing detailed analyses of such notorious gang-related crimes as the murders committed by the "Capeman," Salvador Agron. Schneider focuses on the years from 1940 to 1975, but takes us up to the present in his conclusion, showing how youth gangs are no longer social organizations but economic units tied to the underground economy. Written with a profound understanding of adolescent culture and the street life of New York, this is a powerful work of history and a compelling story for a general audience.
Download or read book The Last Pirate of New York written by Rich Cohen and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Was he New York City’s last pirate . . . or its first gangster? This is the true story of the bloodthirsty underworld legend who conquered Manhattan, dock by dock—for fans of Gangs of New York and Boardwalk Empire. “History at its best . . . I highly recommend this remarkable book.”—Douglas Preston, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Lost City of the Monkey God Handsome and charismatic, Albert Hicks had long been known in the dive bars and gin joints of the Five Points, the most dangerous neighborhood in maritime Manhattan. For years, he operated out of the public eye, rambling from crime to crime, working on the water in ships, sleeping in the nickel-a-night flops, drinking in barrooms where rat-baiting and bear-baiting were great entertainments. His criminal career reached its peak in 1860, when he was hired, under an alias, as a hand on an oyster sloop. His plan was to rob the ship and flee, disappearing into the teeming streets of lower Manhattan, as he’d done numerous times before, eventually finding his way back to his nearsighted Irish immigrant wife (who, like him, had been disowned by her family) and their infant son. But the plan went awry—the ship was found listing and unmanned in the foggy straits of Coney Island—and the voyage that was to enrich him instead led to his last desperate flight. Long fascinated by gangster legends, Rich Cohen tells the story of this notorious underworld figure, from his humble origins to the wild, globe-crossing, bacchanalian crime spree that forged his ruthlessness and his reputation, to his ultimate incarnation as a demon who terrorized lower Manhattan, at a time when pirates anchored off 14th Street. Advance praise for The Last Pirate of New York “A remarkable work of scholarship about old New York, combined with a skillfully told, edge-of-your-seat adventure story—I could not put it down.”—Ian Frazier, author of Travels in Siberia “With its wise and erudite storytelling, Rich Cohen’s The Last Pirate of New York takes the reader on an exciting nonfiction narrative journey that transforms a grisly nineteenth-century murder into a shrewd portent of modern life. Totally unique, totally compelling, I enjoyed every page.”—Howard Blum, New York Times bestselling author of Gangland and American Lightning
Download or read book MS 13 written by Steven Dudley and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the year’s most important books, a gripping meticulously reported account of the rise of one of the world’s most notorious street gangs.” —Mitch Weiss, Pulitzer Prize winner Winner of the Lukas Prize An NPR Best Book of the Year The MS-13 was born from war. In the 1980s, Alex and his brother fled El Salvador for the US and formed the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners. Initially bound by a love of heavy metal music, the group soon took on a harder edge, selling drugs, stealing cars and killing rivals. Gang members like Alex were incarcerated and deported. But in the prison system, the group only grew stronger. Today, MS-13 is one of the most infamous street gangs on earth—and also largely misunderstood. Longtime organized crime investigator Steven Dudley brings readers inside the nefarious group to tell a broader story of flawed US and Central American policies and the exploitative, unequal systems that shape them. “A remarkable feat of reporting; the ways in which the United States is complicit in the creation and preservation of MS-13 might well keep you awake deep into the night, as it did me.” —Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises “By detailing the experiences of gang members and victims alike, he anatomizes the complex, fluid dynamics of this elusive transnational network. A startling book.” —Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times–bestselling author of Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks “The definitive account of MS-13 . . . An outstanding book for true crime readers.” —Library Journal (starred review)
Download or read book Brooklyn Gang written by Bruce Davidson and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 1959, Bruce Davidson read about the teenage gangs of New York City. Connecting with a social worker to make initial contact with a gang in Brooklyn called The Jokers, Davidson became a daily observer and photographer of this alienated youth culture. The Fifties are often considered passive and pale by our standards of urban reality, but Davidson's photographs prove otherwise. Nearly 70 sheet-fed gravure plates show images of tough people, tough lives, tough lovers, all trying to be cool. They are followed by a short recollection by the photographer and a lengthier interview with Bengie, a surviving gang member, who is now a drug counselor."--Magnum Photo.
Download or read book Our Gang written by Jenna Weissman Joselit and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1983-11-22 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our Gang provides a fascinating historical portrait of the Jewish criminal world from the era of mass immigration through Prohibition and beyond. Jenna Weissman Joselit traces the origins, nature, patterns, location, and impact of Jewish crime from the early years, when it was inextricably bound up with the East Side community as a whole, with criminals living among the more or less law-abiding citizens they preyed upon, to the post-World War I period and the gradual assimilation and absorption of Jewish crime into the mainstream of the American underworld. Parallel with this theme is a broader one: the New York Jewish community's reaction to Jewish crime, evolving from disbelief to denial to concern and the establishment of a network of correctional and preventive agencies, and finally—as the nature of Jewish crime changed, and as the community itself felt a growing sense of security—a sort of acceptance.
Download or read book A Pickpocket s Tale The Underworld of Nineteenth Century New York written by Timothy J. Gilfoyle and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-02-07 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A true story more incredible than fiction." —Kevin Baker, author of Striver's Row In George Appo's world, child pickpockets swarmed the crowded streets, addicts drifted in furtive opium dens, and expert swindlers worked the lucrative green-goods game. On a good night Appo made as much as a skilled laborer made in a year. Bad nights left him with more than a dozen scars and over a decade in prisons from the Tombs and Sing Sing to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he reunited with another inmate, his father. The child of Irish and Chinese immigrants, Appo grew up in the notorious Five Points and Chinatown neighborhoods. He rose as an exemplar of the "good fellow," a criminal who relied on wile, who followed a code of loyalty even in his world of deception. Here is the underworld of the New York that gave us Edith Wharton, Boss Tweed, Central Park, and the Brooklyn Bridge.
Download or read book Paradise Alley written by Kevin Baker and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They came by boat from a starving land—and by the Underground Railroad from Southern chains—seeking refuge in a crowded, filthy corner of hell at the bottom of a great metropolis. But in the terrible July of 1863, the poor and desperate of Paradise Alley would face a new catastrophe—as flames from the war that was tearing America in two reached out to set their city on fire.
Download or read book Low Life written by Lucy Sante and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic social history of corruption and vice in nineteenth-century NYC: “A cacophonous poem of democracy and greed, like the streets of New York themselves” (John Vernon, Los Angeles Times Book Review). Lucy Sante’s Low Life is a portrait of America’s greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city’s slums; the teeming streets—scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape. Low Life voyages through Manhattan from four different directions. Part One examines the actual topography of Manhattan from 1840 to 1919; Part Two, the era’s opportunities for vice and entertainment—theaters and saloons, opium and cocaine dens, gambling and prostitution; Part Three investigates the forces of law and order which did and didn’t work to contain the illegalities; Part Four counterposes the city’s tides of revolt and idealism against the city as it actually was. Low Life is one of the most provocative books about urban life ever written—an evocation of the mythology of the quintessential modern metropolis, which has much to say not only about New York’s past but about the present and future of all cities.
Download or read book American Notes written by Charles Dickens and published by Lindhardt og Ringhof. This book was released on 2021-02-26 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "All that is loathsome, drooping, or decayed is here." In 1842 Dickens sailed to America to observe The New World that held such fascination for the English. He went to magnificent landmarks like Niagara Falls but also included visits to mental institutions and prisons. He met President John Tyler in D.C and the well-educated Laura Bridgman, who was deaf-blind. Dickens found lots to admire, but also noted how coarse and ill-mannered the Americans were. That did not go over well with the Americans. With superb language and humour, Dickens gathered these fascinating observations in this travelogue that will have anyone with the slightest interest in cultural differences completely spell-bound. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an English author, social critic, and philanthropist. Much of his writing first appeared in small instalments in magazines and was widely popular. Among his most famous novels are Oliver Twist (1839), David Copperfield (1850), and Great Expectations (1861).
Download or read book Gangster City written by Patrick Downey and published by Barricade Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title chronicles virtually every widely known Mafioso, bootlegger, racketeer and thug who terrorised New York City in the early 20th century. The murders of some 600-plus gangsters are profiled in detail.
Download or read book Jesse James written by T J Stiles and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At sixteen, Jesse James began his fighting career by killing Unionist neighbours on their doorsteps. In the bloodshed and bitterness that followed the South's surrender at Appomattox, Jesse and his fellow guerillas, with their gunfights and hold-ups, became part of the intensely brutal struggle by the White South against the racial egalitarianism and Federal power fostered by Reconstruction. In the first serious biography of Jesse James in forty years, T. J. Stiles paints a strikingly new and vivid portrait of the period before the American Civil War, during the conflict and its aftermath. With groundbreaking scholarship and dazzling reinterpretation, T. J. Stiles has refashioned one of the great legends of American history.
Download or read book Fixing Broken Windows written by George L. Kelling and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1997 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cites successful examples of community-based policing.
Download or read book Smashing the Liquor Machine written by Mark Lawrence Schrad and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the history of temperance and prohibition as you've never read it before: redefining temperance as a progressive, global, pro-justice movement that affected virtually every significant world leader from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. When most people think of the prohibition era, they think of speakeasies, rum runners, and backwoods fundamentalists railing about the ills of strong drink. In other words, in the popular imagination, it is a peculiarly American history. Yet, as Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in Smashing the Liquor Machine, the conventional scholarship on prohibition is extremely misleading for a simple reason: American prohibition was just one piece of a global phenomenon. Schrad's pathbreaking history of prohibition looks at the anti-alcohol movement around the globe through the experiences of pro-temperance leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Leo Tolstoy, Thomás Masaryk, Kemal Atatürk, Mahatma Gandhi, and anti-colonial activists across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Schrad argues that temperance wasn't "American exceptionalism" at all, but rather one of the most broad-based and successful transnational social movements of the modern era. In fact, Schrad offers a fundamental re-appraisal of this colorful era to reveal that temperance forces frequently aligned with progressivism, social justice, liberal self-determination, democratic socialism, labor rights, women's rights, and indigenous rights. Placing the temperance movement in a deep global context, forces us to fundamentally rethink its role in opposing colonial exploitation throughout American history as well. Prohibitionism united Native American chiefs like Little Turtle and Black Hawk; African-American leaders Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells, and Booker T. Washington; suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Frances Willard; progressives from William Lloyd Garrison to William Jennings Bryan; writers F.E.W. Harper and Upton Sinclair, and even American presidents from Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Progressives rather than puritans, the global temperance movement advocated communal self-protection against the corrupt and predatory "liquor machine" that had become exceedingly rich off the misery and addictions of the poor around the world, from the slums of South Asia to the beerhalls of Central Europe to the Native American reservations of the United States. Unlike many traditional "dry" histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers have been led to believe.
