Episodes Located: NEW YORK, New York in the 1880's

  1. Boys and Baseball
    date February 9, 1883map NEW YORK, New Yorktags Adolescence, New York City 1880s, City Life

    Boys do not like sitting around and talking. They would much rather be running, jumping, throwing, and screaming.

    So it comes as a complete surprise to see that on February 9, 1883, a group of adolescent boys, aged anywhere from ten to sixteen, gathered together as delegates of eleven of New York's grammar schools to form a baseball club. The boys came from the city's schools, known by numbers...

  2. Reforming "The Bend"
    date 1888 to 1897map NEW YORK, New Yorktags Urban Society, Urban-Life/Boosterism, Government, Progressive Reformers

    "Where Mulberry Street crooks like an elbow within hail of the old depravity of the Five Points, is "the Bend," foul core of New York's slums." These words, written by Jacob A. Riis in his groundbreaking 1890 work, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, describe a desolate corner of the urban decay that characterized New York's Lower East Side in the late 1800s....

  3. Growing Pains in New York's Lower East Side
    date 1880 to 1901map NEW YORK, New Yorktags Urban-Life/Boosterism, Immigration, Church/Religious-Activity

    An early 1900s postcard photograph from New York's Souvenir Post Card Company captures the Lower East Side's crowded and chaotic environment. As American Jewish historian Hasia Diner notes, "at the right moment in time, under the right conditions, ordinary places become transformed into spaces throbbing with meaning." Such was the case with New York's iconic Lower East Side. The photo shows Hester...

  4. The Double Hip “Ironsides” Corset shapes American Women
    date 1885map NEW YORK, New Yorktags fashion, corsets, women's rights

    Victorian women liked their corsets tight.  If a person looked up and down any busy street in the late nineteenth century, they saw townswomen that struck dramatic silhouettes.  The corset, a tight fitting, boned garment, restricted movement and reshaped the natural position of organs inside a women's body.  A trade card from 1885 featured a corset typical of the period dubbed the Double Hip "Ironsides"...