Bernard Bailyn, "The Challenge of Modern Historiography," American Historical Review 87 (February 1982): 3-4, 7, 24. Complaints about fragmentation later became almost as commonplace as the community studies which Bailyn bemoaned. In the mid-1980s, Thomas Bender observed that even the subfield of social history itself had buckled under the weight of "specialization" and subdivision. "Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History," Journal of American History 73 (June 1986): 128. For other discussions about the demise of synthesis, see, for example, Carl N. Degler, "Remaking American History," Journal of American History 67 (June 1980): 7-25; Herbert G. Gutman, "The Missing Synthesis: Whatever Happened to History," The Nation, November 21, 1981; Ronald W. Schatz, "Labor Historians, Labor Economics, and the Question of Synthesis," Journal of American History 71 (June 1984): 93-100; David Thelen, Nell Irvin Painter, Richard Wightman Fox, Roy Rosenzweig, and Thomas Bender, "A Round Table: Synthesis in American History" Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 107-30; David Oshinsky, "The Humpty Dumpty of Scholarship: American History Has Broken in Pieces, Can It Be Put Together Again?" New York Times, August 26, 2000; and Bender, "Strategies of Narrative Synthesis in American History," American Historical Review 107 (February 2002): 129-53.
2.
Jill Lepore , "Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography," Journal of American History88 (June 2001): 133.
3.
Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York, 1990); Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (Cambridge, 2001); Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The Nineteenth Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York, 2001); Craig Wilder, In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City (New York, 2001). On mid-nineteenth-century New York City, see also Timothy Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 2006); Edward K. Spann, Gotham at War: New York City, 1860-1865 (Wilmington, 2002); Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999); Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York, 1998); Michael Kaplan, "The World of the B’hoys: Urban Violence and the Political Culture of Antebellum New York City, 1826-1860 (PhD diss., New York University, 1996); Ernest McKay, The Civil War and New York City (Syracuse, 1990); and Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840-1857 (New York, 1981).
4.
Marvin McAllister, White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies & Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown’s African and American Theater (Chapel Hill, 2003); Shane White, Stories of Freedom in Black New York (Cambridge, 2002). On the African Grove Theater, see also Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch, A History of African American Theatre (Cambridge, 2003) and Jonathan Dewberry, "The African Grove Theatre and Company," Black American Literature Forum 16 (Winter 1992): 128-31. Recent literature on New York City’s nineteenth-century black community is rich and evolving. See, for example, Leslie M. Alexander, African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861 (Urbana, 2008); David Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777-1827 (Baton Rouge, 2006); Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago, 2003); Wilder, In the Company of Black Men; Phyllis F. Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, 1982); and Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810 (Athens, 1991).
5.
On the Draft Riots, in addition to Bernstein see Tyler Anbinder, "Which Poor Man’s Fight? Immigrants and the Federal Conscription of 1863," Civil War History 52 (December 2006): 344-72; Carla L. Peterson, "African Americans and the New York Draft Riots: Memory and Reconciliation in America’s Civil War," Nanzan Review of American Studies (Nagoya) 27 (2005): 1-14; and Adrian Cook, The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (Lexington, 1974).
6.
Second Founding compliments recent scholarship on Reconstruction that highlights its national and local dimensions. See, for example, Heather Cox Richardson, West From Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven, 2007); Thomas J. Brown, ed. Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (New York, 2006); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, 2001); Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (Cambridge, 2001); Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (New York, 2001); and Katherine Masur, Reconstructing the Nation’s Capital: The Politics of Race and Citizenship in the District of Columbia, 1862-1868 (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2001), forthcoming with University of North Carolina Press.
