| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Richard Haw. The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 307. $26.95.
Richard Haw's book is a cultural history of the Brooklyn Bridge from 1883 to 2003. Opened in 1883, the bridge spans New York City's East River and connects Manhattan to Brooklyn. Haw looked beyond the physical bridge and focused instead on the "cultural bridge of the mind and imagination" (p. 7). In essence, this is a history of how the bridge was portrayed, how it was seen, and how it was used to calm and soothe and make the status quo acceptable.	1
The bridge is well suited for such a history. It is known throughout the world, and it is one of the few grand nineteenth-century structures that have survived in New York City. Haw examines the three different commemorations of the bridge—the 1883 opening ceremony, the 1933 fiftieth anniversary, and the 1983 centennial celebration—and describes how opening-day speeches created an image of the bridge as a triumph of American progress, technology, and commerce. This rhetoric was repeated in the other two ceremonies, and thus the legend was solidified into fact. In the end, the Brooklyn Bridge became an "American cultural memory" (p. 151), not witnessed but imagined, an unchanging and abstracted American master narrative that simplifies and obscures the historical reality.	. . .

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