American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century
by Christine Stansell
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Description
"In the early years of the new century, an exuberant band of talented individualists thrown together in a shabby neighborhood - a few square blocks called Greenwich Village - set out to change the world. Committed to free speech, free love, and politically engaged art, they swept away late-Victorian sexual prudery, the cult of domesticity, stodgy bourgeois art, and political conservatism as they clamorously declared the birth of the new." "In this group portrait, Stansell depicts this most show more colorful generation, the men and women who defined modernity for the America to come."--Jacket show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
This is an interesting survey of a critical era in New York history, when Greenwich Village emerged as the focus of modernism, and the city came to dominate the emerging culture of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, it is also quite repetitive, and often unnecessarily verbose. I found the chapters on the era in Mike Wallace's "Greater Gotham" clearer, more pointed, and better at placing cultural modernism in a socio-economic context.
My 25th or 28th book on New York City at the turn of the 20th Century. We might never return to these progressive and exciting days. The chapters about the women of this cultrual era are especially compelling.
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Good Nonfiction about New York City
62 works; 10 members
Modernism
140 works; 8 members
Author Information

5+ Works 856 Members
Christine Stansell, a professor of history at Princeton University, is the author of "City of Women: Sex & Class in New York City, 1789-1860". Her essays & reviews appear regularly in The New Republic & The London Review of Books. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey. (Bowker Author Biography)
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century
- People/Characters
- Inez Milholland; John Reed; Louise Bryant; Emma Goldman; Eugene O’Neill
- Important places
- New York, New York, USA; Greenwich Village, New York, New York, USA
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, History, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 974.7 — History & geography History of North America Northeastern United States (New England and Middle Atlantic states) New York
- LCC
- F128.5 .S79 — Local History of the United States, Canada and Latin America United States local history New York
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 221
- Popularity
- 146,858
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.36)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 4
- ASINs
- 6





























































