Machine Made

A veteran urban journalist and now an academically trained historian, Terry Golway combines his two crafts in a lively retelling of the colorful history of Tammany Hall across nearly two centuries of New York City's past. From its early national origins through its slow decline in the twentieth century, Tammany Hall, at once the source of Manhattan's deepest democratic impulses and the most antidemocratic dimensions of the city's political culture, shaped the history of the nation's metropolis in a range of ways. Machine Made is rich with illuminating personalities and incidents, and Golway skillfully weaves a dizzying series of memorable portraits and evocative set pieces. He has a particularly fine eye for the ironies and paradoxes that recur across Tammany Hall's history. More than many historians of urban politics, Golway is attentive to the ways that religious faith and denominational identity were central to individual and collective political belief and action. His chapter on Archbishop John Hughes links the rise of an Irish-American political consciousness to Old World patterns and the particular context of New York City in the era of the Civil War. This early exploration of the complicated place of Catholicity, first within Tammany Hall and then across metropolitan public life, serves the author well in later chapters by rooting the political machine's history in the deeply felt experiences of religion, ethnicity, and nation

Archaeology · Context (archaeology · Democracy · Faith · Media studies · Political machine · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law