Get your flash on

by | Feb 17, 2010 | History, Writing New York

The aim of this morning’s lecture in Writing New York was to situate Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass within the nineteenth-century city’s worlds of print, from the highbrow publishing industry to cheap print, penny presses, flash weeklies, and...

World through a Monacle

by | Feb 4, 2009 | Odds and Ends, Writing New York

This morning in lecture I mentioned — while showing this familiar image of the Five Points — that the little fellow up front to the left, the one with the top hat, always reminds me of Eustace Tilley, The New Yorker’s monacled mascot.Turns out this...