>> MARK HORGER: In the next few modules, as we begin
talking about modern American sports in the 19th century.
We're going to find ourselves spending a lot of time in New
York City. And I want in the last mini lecture in Module 2 to say
a few things about why that is. Before the Erie canal goes
through in the 1820s, New York was an important city but it
was not wildly greater in importance, economically or
culturally, than the other major North American port cities of
Boston, Philadelphia, and perhaps Charleston, South Carolina.
But the construction of the Erie Cannel and the creation of a
larger internal market place where the Atlantic Ocean connects
to the Great Lakes connects to the Ohio and Mississippi river
valley, really made New York City the national front door.
Made it more important in influence and in economic power
than the other major cities on the east coast. And this helps
explain the amount of time we'll be spending in New York City
when we talk about the emergence of a variety of forms of
sports and recreation.
New York became the largest market place for goods, services,
entertainment, and culture. Not just because itself, was a large
city, but because it was well within this larger national market
place. New York City grows, in population, enormously
between the 1820s and the Civil War. Both because of
migration from countryside to city and because of migration
from Europe, especially migration of Irish immigrants in the
1840s and 1850s.
And so a lot of the social and culture transformations that we
talked about when we talked about the transformation of
American manufacturing, you see on the streets of New York.
And a lot of the cultural developments that first take place in
New York, particularly in the culture of sport and recreation,
wind up being enormously influential in the rest of the country.
In particularly, we will find ourselves spending a lot of time in
the bowery, which is now the lower east side of New York City,
which was the most significant working class recreational
neighborhood in the city in the 1820s, 30s, 40s, and 50s.
This was where the changes in the work place had the most
obvious impact on the lived geography of the city. This is
where immigration to New York City had the most short-term
social and cultural impact. And it's actually kind of interesting
how many different aspects of American sport and
entertainment culture.
If you're interested in the early history of them you wind up in
the same few blocks of New York City in the 1830s or 1840s.
We'll see some specific examples of this when we talk about
prize fighting in the 1840s and 1850s. and we'll see other
varieties of this as we move throughout the semester.
New York City was a place with a vibrant and occasionally
violent public political culture.
And a place where we will frequently
encounter men in public making statements of identity based
on what kinds of organizations they join, what kinds of sports
they play, who they vote for what kind of people they associate
with, and we will also see other Americans unhappy with those
associations, unhappy with those recreational patterns. Trying
to come up with new forms of social power to counteract those
new developments. So we will spend a great deal of time
talking about the public culture of New York City.
And many of the changes we will discuss took place in other
American cities, more or less, at the same time. But it's not an
accident that many of them happened first in New York or that
many of these developments in New York had a wide influence
on the rest of the country in the first half of the nineteenth
century.