Tyler Anbinder > Quotes

“Dickens’s visit to Five Points made it fashionable for well-to-do New Yorkers to go “slumming,” visiting Five Points as Dickens had done, with a police escort, to marvel at its poverty and gawk at its displays of vice. Indeed, the term “slumming” may have been coined there to describe such tours.”
― Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood

“Every American must feel a thrill of pride and gratitude in the thought that his country is the refuge of the oppressed, . . . and however wretched be the material offered to him from the refuse of other nations, he accepts it with generous hospitality.”
― Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

“How the Other Half Lives”
― Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood

“IN THE WRITING of American history, the Civil War usually marks a turning point. The war brought about the United States’ transition from slavery to freedom.”
― Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

“Those who make their patriotism a vehicle for intolerance are very dangerous.”
― Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

“do you not realize that the State is the worst enemy you have? It is a machine that crushes you in order to sustain the ruling class, your masters . . . Wake up . . . Become daring enough to demand your rights”
― Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

“watering holes had been packed for hours, with revelers throwing back shots of whiskey, hot toddies, and eggnog as they prepared to brave the cold for the traditional outdoor countdown. It seemed as if every city resident, young and old,”
― Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

“Americans in the first quarter of the twentieth century became convinced that Reed was right—that the new immigrants were demonstrably inferior to those from previous generations and that the new wave of immigration, if left unchecked, would dilute the nation’s Anglo-Saxon bloodlines and leave the United States a poorer, weaker, less “American” nation.”
― Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

“The Alien and Sedition Acts are today remembered as terrible extremes of partisanship, but they also marked the first, but by no means the last, case of anti-immigrant fever to infect American politics.22”
― Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

“Dead Rabbit” became the standard phrase by which city residents described any scandalously riotous individual or group. But there seems to be no justification for referring to the Bowery Boys’ adversaries by this name.32”
― Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood

“By 1855, New York’s immigrants outnumbered the native-born. Two-thirds of the city’s adults were foreign-born. In 1860, with a population of 813,000, New York would become the fourth most populous city on the planet. Of all the world’s great metropolises, New York was the only one whose stature could be attributed primarily to immigration.”
― Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York

“The United States, he wrote in 1811, was “a land of peace and plenty, . . . the garden spot of the world; a happy asylum for the banished children of oppression.”
― Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York