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6 books match the query 'Boardinghouses'

cover of Arrogant Beggar

Arrogant Beggar

Anzia Yezierska

Duke University Press, 1996

The target of intense critical comment when it was first published in 1927, Arrogant Beggar’s scathing attack on charity-run boardinghouses remains one of Anzia Yezierska’s most devastating works of social criticism. The novel follows the fortunes of its young Jewish narrator, Adele Lindner, as she leaves the impoverished conditions of New York’s Lower East Side and tries to rise in the world. Portraying Adele’s experiences at the Hellman Home for Working Girls, the first half of the novel exposes the “sickening farce” of institutionalized charity while portraying the class tensions that divided affluent German American Jews from more recently arrived Russian American Jews.
The second half of the novel takes Adele back to her ghetto origins as she explores an alternative model of philanthropy by opening a restaurant that combines the communitarian ideals of Old World shtetl tradition with the contingencies of New World capitalism. Within the context of this radical message, Yezierska revisits the themes that have made her work famous, confronting complex questions of ethnic identity, assimilation, and female self-realization.
Katherine Stubbs’s introduction provides a comprehensive and compelling historical, social, and literary context for this extraordinary novel and discusses the critical reaction to its publication in light of Yezierska’s biography and the once much-publicized and mythologized version of her life story. Unavailable for over sixty years, Arrogant Beggar will be enjoyed by general readers of fiction and be of crucial importance for feminist critics, students of ethnic literature. It will also prove an exciting and richly rewarding text for students and scholars of Jewish studies, immigrant literature, women’s writing, American history, and working-class fiction.
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cover of Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840-1860

Boarding Out

Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840-1860

David Faflik

Northwestern University Press, 2012

Driven by intensive industrialization and urbanization, the nineteenth century saw radical transformations in every facet of life in the United States. Immigrants and rural Americans poured into the nation’s cities, often ahead of or without their families. As city dwellers adapted to the new metropolis, boarding out became, for a few short decades, the most popular form of urban domesticity in the United States.While boarding’s historical importance is indisputable, its role in the period’s literary production has been overlooked. In Boarding Out, David Faflik argues that the urban American boardinghouse exerted a decisive shaping power on the period’s writers and writings. Addressing the works of canonical authors such as Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, as well as neglected popular writers of the era such as Fanny Fern and George Lippard, Faflik demonstrates that boarding was at once psychically, artistically, and materially central in the making of our shared American culture.
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cover of Home Away From Home: A History of Basque Boardinghouses

Home Away From Home

A History of Basque Boardinghouses

Jeronima Echeverria

University of Nevada Press, 1999

In this meticulously researched study of Basque boardinghouses in the United States, Jeronima Echeverria offers a compelling history of the institution that most deeply shaped Basque immigrant life and served as the center of Basque communities throughout the West. She weaves into her narrative the stories of the boarding house owners and operators and the ways they made their establishments a home away from home for their fellow compatriots, as well as the stories of the young Basques who left the security of their beloved homeland to find work in the United States.

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cover of Living on the Boott: Historical Archaeology at the Boott Mills Boardinghouses of Lowell, Massachusetts

Living on the Boott

Historical Archaeology at the Boott Mills Boardinghouses of Lowell, Massachusetts

Stephen A. Mrozowski

University of Massachusetts Press, 1996

Lowell, Massachusetts was the first fully planned industrial city in the United States, and the Boott Mill, established in the 1820s along the Merrimack River, stood at the center of this bold experiment in industrial capitalism. For decades, the company-owned boardinghouses that housed the mills' workers were as much a part of the Lowell system as the looms themselves: a managed, closely supervised domestic world where the rhythms of mill life extended from the factory floor into every corner of daily existence.

Living on the Boott brings this vanished world back to life through rigorous historical archaeology. Drawing on excavations conducted at the Boott Mills boardinghouse complex, Stephen A. Mrozowski, Grace H. Ziesing, and Mary C. Beaudry examine the material remains of the men and women who lived and worked in Lowell's textile industry from the early nineteenth century through its long decline. Through painstaking analysis of ceramics, faunal assemblages, tobacco-related artifacts, and other recovered objects, the authors reconstruct the daily lives, diets, domestic routines, and social relationships of successive generations of boardinghouse residents—from the young "mill girls" recruited from rural New England who made Lowell famous, to the Irish immigrant workers who increasingly replaced them as the century progressed.

The result is a richly documented social history written not from official records alone, but from the objects people actually used, discarded, and left behind. The book illuminates how class, gender, ethnicity, and labor intersected in the intimate spaces of the boardinghouse, and documents the profound changes in living conditions as the Lowell system evolved and the workforce transformed. A landmark contribution to historical archaeology, industrial archaeology, and the history of American labor, Living on the Boott demonstrates the unique power of archaeological evidence to recover the lives of those too often overlooked by conventional historical sources.

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cover of The Crux

The Crux

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Duke University Press, 2003

Long out of print, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel The Crux is an important early feminist work that brings to the fore complicated issues of gender, citizenship, eugenics, and frontier nationalism. First published serially in the feminist journal The Forerunner in 1910, The Crux tells the story of a group of New England women who move west to start a boardinghouse for men in Colorado. The innocent central character, Vivian Lane, falls in love with Morton Elder, who has both gonorrhea and syphilis. The concern of the novel is not so much that Vivian will catch syphilis, but that, if she were to marry and have children with Morton, she would harm the "national stock." The novel was written, in Gilman’s words, as a "story . . . for young women to read . . . in order that they may protect themselves and their children to come." What was to be protected was the civic imperative to produce "pureblooded" citizens for a utopian ideal.

Dana Seitler’s introduction provides historical context, revealing The Crux as an allegory for social and political anxieties—including the rampant insecurities over contagion and disease—in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Seitler highlights the importance of The Crux to understandings of Gilman’s body of work specifically and early feminism more generally. She shows how the novel complicates critical history by illustrating the biological argument undergirding Gilman’s feminism. Indeed, The Crux demonstrates how popular conceptions of eugenic science were attractive to feminist authors and intellectuals because they suggested that ideologies of national progress and U.S. expansionism depended as much on women and motherhood as on masculine contest.

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cover of The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses

The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses

Faflik, David

Rutgers University Press, 2008

The American boardinghouse once provided basic domestic shelter and constituted a uniquely modern world view for the first true generation of U.S. city-dwellers. Thomas Butler Gunn's classic 1857 account of urban habitation, The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses, explores the process by which boardinghouse life was translated into a lively urban vernacular. Intimate in its confessional tone, comprehensive in its detail, disarmingly penetrating despite (or perhaps because of) its self-deprecating wit, Physiology is at once an essential introduction to a "lost" world of boarding, even as it comprises an early, engaging, and sophisticated analysis of America's "urban turn" during the decades leading up to the Civil War.

In his introduction, David Faflik considers what made Gunn's book a compelling read in the past and how today it can elucidate our understanding of the formation and evolution of urban American life and letters.

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