A01=Jennifer Fronc
american culture
Author_Jennifer Fronc
brothels
Category=KNS
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
criminal gangs
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
gambling
gender
government regulators
historical context
history
immigrants
immigration
informants
investigators
jim crow laws
journalism
journalists
national civic federation
new york
political organizations
politics
private surveillance
progressive era
race
racism
raids
segregation
social activism
undercover
united states of america
urban conditions
working class
Product details
- ISBN 9780226266091
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2009
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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To combat behavior they viewed as sexually promiscuous, politically undesirable, or downright criminal, social activists in Progressive-era New York employed private investigators to uncover the roots of society's problems. "New York Undercover" follows these investigators - often journalists or social workers with no training in surveillance - on their information-gathering visits to gambling parlors, brothels, and meetings of criminal gangs and radical political organizations. Drawing on the hundreds of detailed reports that resulted from these missions, Jennifer Fronc reconstructs the process by which organizations like the National Civic Federation and the Committee of Fourteen generated the knowledge they needed to change urban conditions. This information, Fronc demonstrates, eventually empowered government regulators in the Progressive era and beyond, strengthening a federal state that grew increasingly repressive in the interest of pursuing a national security agenda.
Revealing the central role of undercover investigation in both social change and the constitution of political authority, "New York Undercover" narrates previously untold chapters in the history of vice and the emergence of the modern surveillance state.
Jennifer Fronc is assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
