Manhattan Phoenix
The Great Fire of 1835 and the Emergence of Modern New York
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Narrated by:
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Mike Lenz
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By:
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Daniel S. Levy
About this listen
In 1835, a merchant named Gabriel Disosway marveled at a great fire enveloping New York, commenting on how it "spread more and more vividly from the fiery arena, rendering every object, far and wide, minutely discernible - the lower bay and its Islands, with the shores of Long Island and New Jersey". The fire Disosway witnessed devastated a large swath of lower Manhattan, clearing roughly the same number of acres as the World Trade Center bombing.
Manhattan Phoenix explores the emergence of modern New York after it emerged from the devastating the fire of 1835 - a catastrophe that revealed how truly unprepared and haphazardly organized it was - to become a world-class city merely a quarter of a century later. The one led to other. New York effectively had to start over. Daniel Levy's book charts Manhattan's almost miraculous growth while interweaving the lives of various New Yorkers who took part in the city's transformation. Some are well known, such as the land baron John Jacob Astor and Mayor Fernando Wood. Others less so, as with the African American oysterman Thomas Downing and the Bowery Theatre impresario Thomas Hamblin.
Manhattan Phoenix reveals a city first in flames and then in flux but resolute in its determination to emerge as one of the world's greatest metropolises.
©2022 Daniel S. Levy (P)2022 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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- Length: 16 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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No city was more of a help to Abraham Lincoln and the Union war effort - or more of a hindrance. No city raised more men, money, and matériel for the war, and no city raised more hell against it. It was a city of patriots, war heroes, and abolitionists but simultaneously a city of antiwar protest, draft resistance, and sedition. Without his New York supporters, it's highly unlikely Lincoln would have made it to the White House.
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Read twice...post election antidote
- By Pianoman on 12-02-16
By: John Strausbaugh
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City of Dreams
- The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York
- By: Tyler Anbinder
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 24 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Tyler Anbinder's story is one of innovators and artists, revolutionaries and rioters, staggering deprivation and soaring triumphs, all playing out against the powerful backdrop of New York City, at once ever changing and profoundly, permanently itself. City of Dreams provides a vivid sense of what New York looked like, sounded like, smelled like, and felt like over the centuries of its development and maturation into the city we know today.
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Even as a history, not engaging
- By Patrick Kelly on 12-03-16
By: Tyler Anbinder
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Harlem
- The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America
- By: Jonathan Gill
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 19 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Harlem is perhaps the most famous, iconic neighborhood in the United States. A bastion of freedom and the capital of black America, Harlem's 20th-century renaissance changed our arts, culture, and politics forever. But this is only one of the many chapters in a wonderfully rich and varied history. In Harlem, historian Jonathan Gill presents the first complete chronicle of this remarkable place.
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Very Interesting.
- By Joyce Mirowski on 06-05-20
By: Jonathan Gill
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A Few Red Drops
- The Chicago Race Riot of 1919
- By: Claire Hartfield
- Narrated by: J. D. Jackson
- Length: 3 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On a hot day in July 1919, five black youths went swimming in Lake Michigan, unintentionally floating close to the white beach. An angry white man began throwing stones at the boys, striking and killing one. Racial conflict on the beach erupted into days of urban violence that shook the city of Chicago to its foundations. This mesmerizing narrative draws on contemporary accounts as it traces the roots of the explosion that had been building for decades in race relations, politics, business, and clashes of culture.
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Excellent book!
- By Eric Leafblad on 06-03-18
By: Claire Hartfield
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Beale Street Dynasty
- Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis
- By: Preston Lauterbach
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Following the Civil War, Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, thrived as a cauldron of sex and song, violence and passion. But out of this turmoil emerged a center of black progress, optimism, and cultural ferment. Preston Lauterbach tells this vivid, fascinating story through the multigenerational saga of a family whose ambition, race pride, and moral complexity indelibly shaped the city that would loom so large in American life.
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Narration Speed...It's Half the Battle
- By B. Westman on 03-21-17
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London in the Nineteenth Century
- By: Jerry White
- Narrated by: Neil Gardner
- Length: 21 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jerry White's London in the Nineteenth Century is the richest and most absorbing account of the city's greatest century by its leading expert. London in the nineteenth century was the greatest city mankind had ever seen. Its growth was stupendous. Its wealth was dazzling. Its horrors shocked the world. This was the London of Blake, Thackeray and Mayhew, of Nash, Faraday and Disraeli. Most of all it was the London of Dickens. As William Blake put it, London was 'a Human awful wonder of God'.
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SO DETAILED..SO VERY VERY DETAILED.
- By Count B on 06-16-19
By: Jerry White
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New World Coming
- The 1920s and the Making of Modern America
- By: Nathan Miller
- Narrated by: Lloyd James
- Length: 18 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Jazz. Bootleggers. Flappers. Talkies. Model T Fords. Lindbergh's history-making flight over the Atlantic. The 1920s was also the decade of the hard-won vote for women, racial injustice, censorship, social conflict, and the birth of organized crime.
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My High School History Class Never Told
- By Charles Stembridge on 06-29-04
By: Nathan Miller
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Bury the Chains
- Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
- By: Adam Hochschild
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 13 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In early 1787, 12 men - a printer, a lawyer, a clergyman, and others united by their hatred of slavery - came together in a London printing shop and began a remarkable grass-roots movement, battling for the rights of people on another continent. Masterfully stoking public opinion, the movement's leaders pioneered a variety of techniques that have been adopted by citizens' movements ever since, from consumer boycotts to wall posters and lapel buttons to celebrity endorsements.
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Great Eye-Opener
- By Carl Thompson on 01-06-19
By: Adam Hochschild
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Rising Tide
- The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
- By: John M. Barry
- Narrated by: Barry Grizzard
- Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
- Abridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
An American epic of science, politics, race, honor, high society, and the Mississippi River, Rising Tide tells the riveting and nearly forgotten story of the greatest natural disaster this country has ever known, the Mississippi flood of 1927. The river inundated the homes of nearly one million people, helped elect Huey Long governor and made Herbert Hoover president, drove hundreds of thousands of blacks north, and transformed American society and politics forever.
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Where is the rest of the book?
- By Susie on 10-21-13
By: John M. Barry
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The Black Russian
- By: Vladimir Alexandrov
- Narrated by: Peter Marinker
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Black Russian is the incredible story of Frederick Bruce Thomas, born in 1872 to former slaves who became prosperous farmers in Mississippi. After leaving the South and working as a waiter and valet in Chicago and Brooklyn, Frederick sought greater freedom in London, then crisscrossed Europe, and - in a highly unusual choice for a black American at the time - went to Russia in 1899. Because he found no color line there, Frederick made Moscow his home. He renamed himself Fyodor Fyodorovich Tomas, married twice, acquired a mistress, and took Russian citizenship.
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US Born African Descendant 2 Russian Citizenship
- By Sheila Gibson on 03-14-15
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Hershey
- Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams
- By: Michael D'Antonio
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
In this compelling biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael D'Antonio gives us the real-life rags-to-riches story of Milton S. Hershey, a largely uneducated businessman whose idealistic sense of purpose created an immense financial empire, a town, and a legacy that lasts to this day.
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The Benchmark for Chartiable, Rich Men
- By Boyd Tschaggeny on 01-30-19
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The Devil in the White City
- Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
- By: Erik Larson
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 14 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds.
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A Rich Read!
- By D on 09-18-03
By: Erik Larson
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A Little History of the World
- By: E. H. Gombrich
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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E. H. Gombrich's world history, an international best seller now available in English for the first time, is a text dominated not by dates and facts but by the sweep of experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity's achievements, and an acute witness to its frailties.
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an enlightening book; very well read
- By A.B.Oxford on 06-03-06
By: E. H. Gombrich