Merchant's House Museum

Selected Bibliography

FREE ONLINE RESOURCES

• For a list of free NYC history resources online, including reference resources, links to numerous websites, digital exhibitions, and libraries see the NYPL’s “Best of the Web: New York City History” at: www.nypl.org/about/divisions/milstein/internet-resources/new-york-city. (This is no longer updated but it remains very useful).
• Internet Archive: www.archive.org
• Library of Congress: www.loc.gov
• HathiTrust Digital Library: www.hathitrust.org

 

PRIMARY SOURCES

• [Bristed, Charles Astor]. The Upper Ten Thousand: Sketches of American Society. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1852.
• Brown, Henry Collins, ed. Valentine’s Manual of the City of New York 1917-1918. [New York]: Old Colony Press, 1918.
• DeVoe, Thomas F. The Market Book. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1862.
• DeVoe, Thomas F. The Market Assistant. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1867.
• Foster, George G. New York by Gaslight and Other Urban Sketches. Originally published in 1850, new edition published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990.
• Gunn, Thomas Butler. The Physiology of New-York Boarding Houses. New York: Mason Brothers, 1857.
• Haswell, Charles H. Reminiscences of an Octogenarian of the City of New York, 1816-1860. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1896.
• Havens, Catherine E. Diary of a Little Girl in Old New York. New York: H.C Brown, 1920.
• King, Moses., ed. King’s Handbook of New York City, 1892. An Outline, History and Description of the American Metropolis. New York: Benjamin Bloom Inc., 1972 [Originally published by author, 1892].
• Lamb, Martha J. History of the City of New York: Its Origin, Rise and Progress. New York: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1876.
• Lanier, Henry W. A Century of Banking in New York, 1822-1922. New York: G.H. Doran Company, 1922.
• Lyon, Isaac C. Recollections of an Old Cartman. Newark, NJ: Printed in the Daily Journal Office, 1872.
• Nevins, Allan, ed. The Diary of Philip Hone 1828-1851. New York: Dodd, Mead &Company, 1927.
• ___________and Milton Halsey Thomas, Ed. The Diary of George Templeton Strong. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1952.
• Pelletreau, William Smith. Early New York Houses: with Historical and Genealological Notes. New York: F.P. Harper, 1900.
• Schermerhorn, Gene. Letters to Phil: Memories of a New York Boyhood, 1848-1856. New York: New York Bound, 1982.
• Scoville, Joseph A. The Old Merchants of New York City. 5 v. New York: Carleton, 1864-1870.
• Smith, Matthew Hale. Sunshine and Shadow in New York. Hartford: J.B. Burr & Company, 1868.
• Stevens, John Austin, Martha J. Lamb, and William Abbatt. The Magazine of American History. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1877-1893.
• Stokes, I.N. Phelps. The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909. New York: Robert H. Dodd, 1915-1928 – 6 v.
• Williams, Edwin. New York As It Is. [1833-35]. New York: J. Disturnell, 1834.
• Wright, Mabel Osgood. My New York. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926.

 

THE ESSENTIALS

• Albion, Robert. The Rise of New York Port, [1835-1860]. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1939.
• Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Homberger, Eric. The Historical Atlas of New York City. New York: Owl Books, 2005.
• Jackson, Kenneth T., ed. The Encyclopedia of New York City. New York, New Haven, and London: Yale University Press and the New York Historical Society, 1995.
• Knapp, Mary L. Miracle on Fourth Street: Saving an Old Merchant’s House. New York: Girandole Books, 2015.
• Knapp, Mary L. An Old Merchant’s House: Life at Home in New York City, 1835-65. New York: Girandole Books, 2012.
• White, Norvell and Elliot Willensky. AIA Guide to New York City, 5th ed. New York: Crown Publishers, 2010.

 

ARCHITECTURE and DECORATIVE ARTS

• Lockwood, Charles. Bricks and Brownstone: The New York Row House 1783-1929. New York: McGraw Hill, 2004.
• Garrett, Elizabeth Donaghy. At Home: The American Family 1750-1870. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990.
• Voorsanger, Catherine and John K. Howat, eds. Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

 

CULTURE

• Goodman, Matthew. The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
• Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1982.
• Henkin, David. City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
• Homberger, Eric. Mrs. Astor’s New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
• Johnson, Victoria. American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2018.
• King, Greg. A Season of Splendor: The Court of Mrs. Astor in Gilded Age New York. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2009.
• Martin, Justin. Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2014.
• Nevins, James and Michelle Nevius. Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2014.
• Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.

 

EATING and DRINKING

• Batterberry, Michael and Ariane Batterberry. On the Town in New York: A History of Eating, Drinking and Entertainment from 1776 to the Present. New York: Routledge, 1999.
• Bayles, W. Harrison. Old Taverns of New York City. New York: Frank Allaben Geneological Company, 1915.
• Brown, Henry Collins. Delmonico’s: A Story of Old New York. New York: Valentine Manuals, 1928.
• Grimes, William. Appetite City. A Culinary History of New York. New York: North Point Press, 2009.
• Kurlansky, Mark. The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell. New York: Ballantine Books, 2006.
• Lobel, Cindy. Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in 19th Century New York. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

 

GROWTH and DEVELOPMENT of NEW YORK CITY

• Alexiou, Alice Sparberg. Devil’s Mile: The Rich, Gritty History of the Bowery. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018.
• Ballon, Hilary, ed. The Greatest Grid. The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011. New York: The Museum of the City of New York and Columbia University Press, 2012.
• Beckert, Sven. The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Blackmar, Elizabeth. Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
• DeVillo, Stephen Paul. The Bowery: The Strange History of New York’s Oldest Street. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., 2017.
• Holloway, Marguerite. The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randal, Jr., Cartographer, Surveyor, Inventor. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.
• Koeppel, Gerard. City on a Grid: How New York Became New York. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2015.
• Koeppel, Gerard. Water for Gotham: A History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
• Leadon, Fran. Broadway: A History of New York City in Thirteen Miles. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.
• Lockwood, Charles. Manhattan Moves Uptown: an Illustrated History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976.
• McNeur, Catherine. Taming Manhattan. Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.
• Rosenzweig, Roy and Elizabeth Blackmar. The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.
• Shorto, Russell. The Island at the Center of the World. New York: Doubleday, 2004.
• Spann, Edward K. The New Metropolis: New York City 1840-1857. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
• Still, Bayard. Mirror for Gotham: New York as Seen by Contemporaries from Dutch Days to the Present. New York: NYU Press, 1956.
• Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850. New York: Oxford U. Press, 1984.

 

HEALTH CARE

• Horn, Stacy. Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th-Century New York. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2018.
• Rosenberg, Charles E. The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
• __________________. The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
• Rothman, David. The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic. NY: Aldine Transactions, 2002.
• Rothman, Sheila. Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
• Starr, Paul. The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

 

IMMIGRATION and DOMESTIC SERVICE

• Bayor, Ronald and Timothy Meagher, eds. The New York Irish. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
• Diner, Hasia R. Erin’s Daughter’s in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.
• Dudden, Faye E. Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U. Press, 1983.
• Lynch-Brennan, Margaret. The Irish Bridget. Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840-1930. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009.

 

POLITICS and the CIVIL WAR

• Beckett, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf, 2015.
• Bernstein, Iver. The New York City Draft Riots. Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Cornog, Evan. The Birth of Empire: DeWitt Clinton and the American Experience, 1769-1828. Oxford, UK.: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Vintage Books, 2008.
• Spann, Edward K. Gotham at War: New York City 1860-1865. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013.

 

POVERTY and the UNDERBELLY

• Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points. The 19th Century New York Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: The Free Press, 2001.
• Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of New York. An Informal History of the Underworld. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2001.
• Cohen, Patricia Cline. The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Vintage, 1999.
• Gilfoyle, Timothy J. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992.
• Hill, Marilynn Wood. Their Sisters’ Keepers: Prostitution in New York City: 1830-1870. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
• Sante, Luc. Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991.
• Stashower, Daniel. The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allen Poe and the Invention of Murder. New York: Dutton, 2006.