Another City: Urban Life And Urban Spaces In The New American Republic

摘要

On January 17, 2009, President-Elect Barack Obama embarked on a re-creation of Abraham Lincoln's historic whistle-stop tour from Philadelphia to Washington for the inauguration. While the route and the ride were true to the original, the view from the train windows was naturally quite different. In Another City, Dell Upton, Ph.D., a professor of anthropology and architecture at the University ofVirginia, resurrects Philadelphia as Lincoln and his contemporaries saw it seven score and eight years ago. But Upton considers not only how but also why the city evolved as it did from colonial to antebellum times, and he does the same when he turns his attention to New Orleans. These urban portraits by Upton are anything but romantic. As late as the 1860s, daily life in American cities was an unremitting assault on the senses, the air rank with the bloated corpses of animals and the raw refuse of urban privies and echoing with the clatter of iron wheels on stone, the clanging of bells, and the shouts of vendors hawking their wares.