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Bezig met laden... The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Villagedoor John Strausbaugh
   Books Read in 2023 (2,669) Bezig met laden...
 Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. 1   jasonpettus | Feb 7, 2015 |   i enjoyed this book more when he got into periods i'm more familiar with--starting with beatniks. (  ) mahallett | Oct 7, 2013 |  ALinNY458 | Apr 23, 2013 | geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
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This is an anecdotal history of Greenwich Village, the prodigiously influential and infamous New York City neighborhood, from the 1600s to the present. The most famous neighborhood in the world, Greenwich Village has been home to outcasts of diverse persuasions, from "half-free" Africans to working-class immigrants, from artists to politicians, for almost four hundred years. In this book, the author weaves a narrative history of the Village, a tapestry that unrolls from its origins as a rural frontier of New Amsterdam in the 1600s through its long reign as the Left Bank of America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from its seat as the epicenter of the gay rights movement to its current status as an affluent bedroom community and tourist magnet. He traces the Village's role as a culture engine, a bastion of tolerance, freedom, creativity, and activism that has spurred cultural change on a national, and sometimes even international, scale. He brings to life the long line of famous nonconformists who have collided there, collaborating, fusing and feuding, developing the ideas and creating the art that forever altered societal norms. In these pages, geniuses are made and destroyed, careers are launched, and revolutions are born. Poe, Whitman, Cather, Baldwin, Kerouac, Mailer, Ginsberg, O'Neill, Pollock, La Guardia, Koch, Hendrix, and Dylan all come together across the ages, at a cultural crossroads the likes of which we may never see again. From Dutch farmers and Washington Square patricians to slaves and bohemians, from Prohibition-era speakeasies to Stonewall, from Abstract Expressionism to AIDS, and from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire to today's upscale condos and four-star restaurants, the connecting narratives of The Village tell the fresh and unforgettable story of America itself. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)974.71History and Geography North America Northeastern U.S. New York New York (city)LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (3.81)
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Like most people, I've always primarily associated the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan with the Abstract Expressionists and Beat poets of the post-World-War-Two era, when the near-total destruction of Europe made this unassuming neighborhood the new global center of hipness and cool, a literal symbol of the worldwide cultural takeover the United States pulled off in general in the 1950s; but as John Strausbaugh shows in his remarkable new 600-page history of the neighborhood, Greenwich Village's bohemian roots actually go all the way back to the birth of Romanticism in the early 1800s and the invention of the term "bohemian" to begin with, and that this loosely defined confederation of "old New York" streets has been a constant haven for artists, druggies, the gay community and intellectual minorities ever since, not just in the years that it was known world-wide for this. Originally a sleepy suburb of New York City proper (thus the "Village" designation that has stuck with it ever since), it just so happened that this was the hot growing neighborhood for middle-class businessmen and their artist friends back in the early 1800s when the "bohemian class" was first invented, essentially a construct of the Romantic Era that redefined artists from hard-working craftsmen into tortured souls who suffered for aesthetics' sake; and so it was to this neighborhood that the first generation of bohemians turned when doing their suffering and drinking and casual sex, with Strausbaugh painting an enviable portrait of a sweaty, smoky Victorian-Age Greenwich populated by the nation's first gay bars and opium dens, visited on a regular basis by such stalwarts as Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane. And that's the way the neighborhood essentially continued without a break for the next 150 years, with Strausbaugh devoting large and detailed sections of his exhaustive book to the turn of the century and the rise of the great New York art museums; the Village after World War One when it became essentially the "Left Bank Lite;" its mainstream heyday in the World War Two era; and its last hurrah as a locus for gay rights in the 1960s and '70s, before massive gentrification in the '80s and '90s turned it into a permanent upper-class historical district that artists can no longer afford to live in. Smart and accessible, and full of literally hundreds of anecdotes about its most infamous citizens of the last two centuries, Strausbaugh's book is an epic read but a hugely rewarding one, and it comes strongly recommended to anyone interested in knowing more about the history of artistic neighborhoods in the United States.
Out of 10: 9.7 (