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What did the daily lives of people in the urban centers of the young USA look like? What issues did they grapple with and how were these communicated? Different (single sheet) forms of print and prose offer a glimpse into the happenings and habits of the time in the form of chapbooks, ballads, broadsides, or pamphlets. This seminar investigates urban life through different forms of media circulating in the streets of New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and other major American cities before 1900. For this it works with both historic printed ephemera of transitory nature, something the Library of Congress has described as “elusive scraps of yesterday's ‘stuff’” (https://www.loc.gov), as well as street literature (not to be confused with the contemporary genre of urban literature), mementos and official proclamations intended to be preserved. |
