City Reading: The Written Word and the Urban Public in New York City, 1825-1866

This dissertation explores the role that reading played in the construction of public life in New York City between the opening of the Erie Canal and the end of the Civil War. From street signs to parade banners, from newspapers to paper money, written and printed words proliferated across the cityscape, shaping the daily life of New York's burgeoning population and promoting competing visions of the urban public. Drawing on a variety of visual sources documenting the changing cityscape over this period, as well as a wide range of verbal evidence (newspapers, magazines, diaries, travel logs, personal reminiscences, municipal guides, government records, reference books, short stories, and novels) the dissertation argues that reading experiences which were broadly shared and firmly anchored in public space came to assume a prominent role in determining how New Yorkers of different genders, classes, ethnicities, and neighborhoods imagined their urban community. As New York became a city of strangers in which familiar faces, stable architectural landmarks, and traditional connections between land and wealth lost their stability and reliability, everyday encounters with signs, handbills, bulletin boards, daily newspapers, and bank notes provided the foundation for new experiences of public space and new expressions of public authority.