| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York. By David M. Henkin. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. xvii, 242 pp. Cloth, $45.00, isbn 0-231-10744-7. Paper, $16.50, isbn 0-231-10745-5.)

To appreciate David M. Henkin's City Reading to the fullest, readers had better subscribe to what may be dubbed "urban exceptionalist instrumentalism"—that modern cities must do something to people's experience that other types of collective habitations do not—for the author proceeds on the assumption that this is so. In his consideration of this "new kind of public life," Henkin aims "to trace the origin of modern urban sensibility to acts of reading," by which he means "the experience of written words posted, circulated, fixed, and flashed in public view." What is it about antebellum New York that prompts the innovation? It is not population density per se, according to Henkin, but anonymity, perhaps even anomie: "Cut loose from personal authority and circulating promiscuously in a world of strangers, the signs, cards, posters, newspapers, and bills described in this study provided new vehicles and new models for communication in an urban environment." . . .

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