Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman's Saloon, 1870-1920 (Historical Studies of Urban America)
Powers has met with some incredulity when she mentions that she's a "saloon historian"Acolleagues snicker and the dean gets that faraway look in his eyes. Fortunately, Powers persisted in her study of a subject long overlooked by others on the grounds that it is frivolous or immoral, and the result is a detailed and thoroughly researched yet readable account of "how saloongoers promoted the process of community building in urban America from 1870 to 1920," the turbulent years in which the Industrial Revolution reached its peak and had its greatest effect on American society. Her chronicle of the "poor man's club" draws from observations by contemporary journalists (including photographers, sketch artists and cartoonists), by writers such as Jack London and by such progressive reformers as Lincoln Steffens and Jane Addams. What Powers learned was that the saloons provided a milieu in which the workingman could work out solutions to his own needs; her startling if useful analogy is that the barroom is like the school yard, with its own games, songs, jests, challenges and lore, all of which help the participant to accommodate the pressures imposed by the larger world of work or school. So here's looking at professor Powers, for a sober account, yet one with a surprise on every pageAsuch as the discovery that "The Streets of Laredo" is a version of an old English song about a sailor who dies of syphilis, a cleaned-up rewrite for these Puritanical shores.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.