San Antonio College Library

As cities have gentrified, educated urbanites have come to prize what they regard as "authentic" urban life: aging buildings, art galleries, small boutiques, upscale food markets, neighborhood old-timers, funky ethnic restaurants, and old, family-owned shops. These signify a place's authenticity, in contrast to the bland standardization of the suburbs and exurbs. But as Sharon Zukin shows in Naked City, the rapid and pervasive demand for authenticity--evident...

In wholly original and startling ways, the authors of this inspired volume capture New York's spirit -- on the streets and in the subways, in the shops, hotels, and "eating houses", at riots, in newspapers, on bridges and in parks, in sweat shops, and in some of its denizens' diaries. An expansive range of more than one hundred brilliant voices includes Mary McCarthy, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Djuna Barnes, Langston Hughes, Henry James,...

A universally recognized icon, the Statue of Liberty is perhaps the most beloved of all American symbols. Yet no one living in 1885, when the crated monument arrived in New York Harbor, could have foreseen the central place the Statue of Liberty would come to occupy in the American imagination. With the particular insights of a cultural historian and scholar of French history, Edward Berenson tells the little-known stories of the statue's improbable...