Book Reviews In the Watches of the Night Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820-1930

摘要

Peter C. Baldwin's In the Watches of the Night explores the scope and complexity of the nighttime city, charting its transformation first by the introduction of gas lighting in the 1820s and again by electric light at the turn of the twentieth century. Within clearly set parameters (Baldwin focuses on American cities of the Northeast and Midwest and ends his account with full electrification in the 1920s), the work is expansive in its cataloging of nocturnal work, crime, transportation, and leisure. Its cast of characters includes familiar nighttime figures like tavern keepers, night watchmen, and prostitutes, but here they are joined by Lowell mill girls and the male retail clerks of New York City, bakers and farmers bringing their goods to market, newspapermen getting out the morning edition, night scavengers collecting waste from privies, and iron, steel, and glass workers adjusting to continuous production on the night shift. And these are just the workers!