Narrator Mark Boyett delivers Strausbaugh’s informed and entertaining history of the City of New York during the Civil War and its aftermath. Although he covers the horrific draft riots, crooked elections, and other significant events that took place within the city, he focuses on the achievements and scandals of New Yorkers on the battlefields, in Washington, DC, and around the world. Boyett is an impressive voice actor. His voice evokes a young David McCullough at his gravelly best. Boyett is always easy to understand. His pacing is good, calming but not soporific. He is comfortable with the pronunciation of almost forgotten terms. Strausbaugh searches for comedy in the conduct of his subjects. His style can minimize the tragedy of their time. F.C. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
City of Sedition: The History of New York City during the Civil War
Narrated by Mark Boyett
John StrausbaughUnabridged — 16 hours, 20 minutes
City of Sedition: The History of New York City during the Civil War
Narrated by Mark Boyett
John StrausbaughUnabridged — 16 hours, 20 minutes
Overview
No city was more of a help to Abraham Lincoln and the Union war effort, or more of a hindrance. No city raised more men, money, and materiel for the war, and no city raised more hell against it. It was a city of patriots, war heroes, and abolitionists, but simultaneously a city of antiwar protest, draft resistance, and sedition.
Without his New York supporters, it's highly unlikely Lincoln would have made it to the White House. Yet, because of the city's vital and intimate business ties to the Cotton South, the majority of New Yorkers never voted for him and were openly hostile to him and his politics. Throughout the war New York City was a nest of antiwar "Copperheads" and a haven for deserters and draft dodgers. New Yorkers would react to Lincoln's wartime policies with the deadliest rioting in American history. The city's political leaders would create a bureaucracy solely devoted to helping New Yorkers evade service in Lincoln's army. Rampant war profiteering would create an entirely new class of New York millionaires, the "shoddy aristocracy." New York newspapers would be among the most vilely racist and vehemently antiwar in the country. Some editors would call on their readers to revolt and commit treason; a few New Yorkers would answer that call. They would assist Confederate terrorists in an attempt to burn their own city down, and collude with Lincoln's assassin.
Here in City of Sedition, a gallery of fascinating New Yorkers comes to life, the likes of Horace Greeley, Walt Whitman, Julia Ward Howe, Boss Tweed, Thomas Nast, Matthew Brady, and Herman Melville. This book follows the fortunes of these figures and chronicles how many New Yorkers seized the opportunities the conflict presented to amass capital, create new industries, and expand their markets, laying the foundation for the city's-and the nation's-growth. WINNER OF THE FLETCHER PRATT AWARD FOR BEST NON-FICTION BOOK
Editorial Reviews
"The real war will never get in the books." So wrote Walt Whitman in Specimen Days. But Strausbaugh's City of Sedition comes captivatingly close in its account of the vexed and often ambivalent role New York and its citizens played in the not-so-Civil War…Strausbaugh weaves an ambitious and sprawling narrative while piecing together a crazy quilt of historical facts and fascinating anecdotes. He convincingly undermines myths…
05/30/2016
Strausbaugh follows 2013’s The Village, an encyclopedic history of New York City’s Greenwich Village, with an expert look at the city in the tumultuous years leading up to and through the Civil War. “New York City would play a huge role in the war, but it would be a hugely confused and conflicted one,” he writes. “No city would be more of a help to Lincoln and the Union war effort, or more of a hindrance.” As Strausbaugh focuses on the array of colorful characters who influenced events—including newsman Horace Greeley, abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, and Tammany Hall leader William “Boss” Tweed—he spins a complex tale of a rapidly growing and changing city where immigration, slavery, and politics all had immense roles to play. This is an entertaining, informative, and educational narrative, though the density of rich detail can get the reader bogged down; Strausbaugh sometimes pays too much attention to pivotal individuals in the maelstrom of events. He ranges over the better part of a century to thoroughly and confidently capture the full scope of the story, resulting in an almost epic saga. Agent: Chris Calhoun, Chris Calhoun Agency. (Aug.)
"For anyone raised on the notion that, during the Civil War, the northern states stood strongly united against slavery and behind Abraham Lincoln, John Strausbaugh's insightful CITY OF SEDITION will offer a potent and engaging antidote. Training his focus on the vibrant, chaotic city of New York, Strausbaugh sheds valuable light on the ambivalence and complexity with which Civil War America responded to thorny problems of class, race, and disunion."—John Matteson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Eden's Outcasts and The Lives of Margaret Fuller
"An engrossing account of a fascinating time and place in American history. Strausbaugh gives us some of the great figures of the republic, along with Confederate spies, Irish mobs, and some of the most shameless scoundrels in the city's history. A constant page-turner that also delves deep into a complex and surprising era."—Kevin Baker, author of The Big Crowd and Paradise Alley
"What a terrific job! Strausbaugh paints New York in a vortex of treason and war, profit and chaos, idealism, energy, and murderous violence. CITY OF SEDITION is bright, urgent, and fast as a fire truck."—Richard Brookhiser, author of Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln
"For Abraham Lincoln, New York City was both a boon and a bane: a source of vital support and bitter recrimination. In this gripping, highly original book, John Strausbaugh guides us through a city at war with itself-a tale he tells with nuance, verve, and great discernment."—Kevin Peraino, author of Lincoln in the World: The Making of a Statesman and the Dawn of American Power
"John Strausbaugh's new work opens the door . . . as no book has done before. Deeply researched and written with flair by an acknowledged authority on the history of the metropolis, CITY OF SEDITION leaves no doubt that 150 years ago New York was already 'a helluva town.'"—William C. Davis, author of Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee-The War they Fought, the Peace They Forged
"CITY OF SEDITION is a rich feast of outrageous incidents, larger-than-life characters, and often astonishing revelations. John Strausbaugh expertly reveals how a deeply divided New York gave Abraham Lincoln 'more help and more trouble' during the Civil War than any other city in the Union."—Gary Krist, author of City of Scoundrels and Empire of Sin
"This capstone urban study of superb scholarship is highly recommended for U.S. and regional historians, Civil War scholars, metropolitan specialists, and general readers alike."—Library Journal, Starred Review
Strausbaugh - journalist and free-range historian, author of rousing books on Greenwich Village, racial appropriation, and geriatric rockers - reexamines a strange chapter in city history that's not exactly unknown...but rarely seen in full...Edifyingly fascinating.—Vulture.com
"Strausbaugh...flanks the era's familiar protagonists with a boisterous chorus of idiosyncratic New Yorkers...in this kaleidoscopic, detail-filled account."—The New York Times
"...a richly layered and often surprising history, as crowded and fast-paced as a Manhattan sidewalk."—Shelf Awareness
Populated by an epic cast of characters lurching through evocative tableaux at a breakneck pace, Mr. Strausbaugh's book stands alone, but never still.—The Wall Street Journal
★ 05/01/2016
New York played a central role in the Civil War. No other U.S. city raised more troops, money, and supplies for the conflict—and nowhere was there more opposition against it. By portraying New York as a hub for patriots, war heroes, and abolitionists, Strausbaugh (The Village) also shows that it was an arena of protest, draft evasion, and disloyalty. He writes that New Yorkers reacted to Abraham Lincoln's wartime policies with rioting; that its electorate significantly influenced the presidential campaigns of 1860 and 1864; and that its newspapers were among the most racist, nativist, and antiwar, even to the extent of inciting violence and sedition. Paradoxically, Strausbaugh notes that the same New York banks that funded the spread of the prewar South's plantation system and international slave trade would also provide the start-up capital for the Union's war machine. The inclusion of fascinating biographical cameos such as those of publisher-politician Horace Greeley, politician Boss Tweed, Gen. George McClellan, and songwriter Stephen Foster adds immeasurably to the pace of the narrative. Strausbaugh closes with Lincoln's assassination and the swindles of the Ulysses S. Grant administration. VERDICT This capstone urban study of superb scholarship is highly recommended for U.S. and regional historians, Civil War scholars, metropolitan specialists, and general readers alike.—John Carver Edwards, formerly with Univ. of Georgia Libs.
Narrator Mark Boyett delivers Strausbaugh’s informed and entertaining history of the City of New York during the Civil War and its aftermath. Although he covers the horrific draft riots, crooked elections, and other significant events that took place within the city, he focuses on the achievements and scandals of New Yorkers on the battlefields, in Washington, DC, and around the world. Boyett is an impressive voice actor. His voice evokes a young David McCullough at his gravelly best. Boyett is always easy to understand. His pacing is good, calming but not soporific. He is comfortable with the pronunciation of almost forgotten terms. Strausbaugh searches for comedy in the conduct of his subjects. His style can minimize the tragedy of their time. F.C. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
2016-05-14
A focused study of how the "biggest, wealthiest metropolis in the North" proved as much of a hindrance to the Union war effort as a help. Strausbaugh (The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village, 2013, etc.), who has been writing about New York City for 25 years, tells a gritty tale of opportunism and chutzpah involving the financial capital of the riven United States when faced with the shutting down of its two golden commodities: cotton and slaves. Around the time of the secession of the Southern states from the Union, cotton represented "a whopping 40 percent of all the goods shipped out of the port of New York." Not only did the South rely on the New York bankers to finance the expansion of King Cotton—in 1860, the U.S. exported two-thirds of the world's cotton—but the South, which deigned to develop the necessary mills, had to ship the cotton up the coast or across the Atlantic for manufacture. This allowed New Yorkers to take their cut. Moreover, despite the ban on slave-running since 1820, the practice continued illegally, to enormous profit; the author notes that by the 1850s "it was an open secret that New York was the North's major slaving port." At the outbreak of war with the shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor on April 12, 1861, patriotic fervor gripped the numerous penny tabloids, and the immigrant communities mobilized target companies. Yet Strausbaugh emphasizes how the struggle by poor immigrants to wrestle employment from the freed blacks led to animosity and even rioting. While this contingent would have never fought over the cause of slavery, the abolitionists and progressives were vociferous, as represented by Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune. New York rebounded nicely with war profiteering, creating a whole new class of "shabby aristocracy." A narrative that smoothly and engagingly incorporates many stories of the war that have been told separately elsewhere.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170378609 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hachette Audio |
| Publication date: | 08/02/2016 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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